


Closure

by Taelr



Category: Alien: Isolation (Video Game)
Genre: Alien: Isolation spoilers, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Certain characters are spared rather than dying, Christopher Samuels Lives, F/M, Mutual Pining, game walkthrough (kind of?)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-08-27 09:26:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16699855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taelr/pseuds/Taelr
Summary: Amanda Ripley is given the chance to go back. A chance to save some people who she couldn't before, a chance to spare some she killed, and a chance to do things differently this time around. Some things happen along the way. Hiding for her life, becoming more than a little acquainted with a flamethrower, and noting that there's more to some of the synthetics she knows than she initially realized, just to name a few.





	1. Going Back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, it's cool you've gotten this far. The basic gist here is I recently completed Alien: Isolation for the first time and I needed an outlet for all of my sudden and intense Ripley/Samuels feels. This is going to be a bit different than any fics I've written in the past because I'm going to update it as I play through the game again, and the story is going to more or less be like a novelization of the gameplay and storyline, but with some extra scenes here and there (AND a happy ending for more than just a couple of characters, imagine that). For those of you who have played and know about all the details, don't worry; I'm not going to talk about every time Ripley crafts something or picks up a pile of scrap or a charge pack. The way I see it, maybe this way people who don't enjoy playing horror games can read their way through one. And hopefully end up shipping Samuels and Ripley as hopelessly and passionately as I do. As for readers of my other stories; have no fear! I'll only be updating this as I play through the game, so my preexisting stuff will update more frequently and won't be affected. Thanks again, and I hope you enjoy!

 “Amanda Ripley.” 

She turned to look over her left shoulder, straightening and sitting up so she wasn’t leaning on her elbows on the bar any longer. She swiveled on her stool and turned to face the man intruding on her happy hour.  _Happy hour. Ha. Shut up._ _I haven’t had a happy hour in . . . Anyways._ He was maybe in the early stages of becoming middle aged, average height and build, and completely unremarkable in every other way. “Who’s asking?” she quipped, now leaning back to rest the bottom of her shoulder blades against the bar. 

“Is that really important?” he asked. His voice was . . . forgettable. Not deep, not nasal. No accent. Just basic and easy to understand, easy to forget. Nothing about him stuck out in her mind, and she was willing to bet that after their initial meeting, nothing about him would  _be_ stuck in her mind later. 

“Yes, actually,” she said, briefly thinking about the reporters and the conspiracy theorists who had endlessly approached her in the last year. She moved to turn back and face the bar, but he took a step closer and she stopped, narrowing her eyes at him slightly. It wasn’t exactly a warning, but she knew he was reading her body language, and right now her posture definitely said  _fuck off_. 

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, now moving to take the seat beside her. 

“No,” she said immediately, turning back to the bar but keeping a close eye on him. He’d chosen to sit on her left side. Damn him. There was no way he could know it was her weaker side, only that way after all the bullshit on Sevastopol. Maybe he did know. She bristled at the idea but casually pushed it away, understanding that of all the places, this was not it. Weyland-Yutani hadn’t succeeded so far and it was bold, even for them, to do something aggressive in a public bar. Especially this bar, where people didn’t know her and she didn’t know them, but they all respected that. There was a closer community of loyal acquaintances here than in most neighborhoods that held potlucks every month. It wasn’t because any of them knew each other, but quite the opposite; none of them knew about each other, and they left it that way. There was a silent comradery that grew out of something like that. 

But back to the present. Left side.  _Shit_. “What do you want?” 

“Just to talk.” 

“Oh boy, what about? My mother? Me? The shit that went wrong with the Seegson Androids on Sevastopol?” 

He tilted his head at her and the bar lights glinted in his eye just so. She saw something small, the last tendrils in the end of a complicated code, something that was usually invisible unless it was held under specific lighting conditions. Something that normally blended flawlessly with the synthetic eyeball that it was printed into. The fact that she’d seen it now was lucky. Or maybe she was just always looking out for those things these days. Not that the androids that had gone rogue on her before had looked at all human. This man looked human enough, but so had Samuels . . . Another thought to shove unceremoniously out of her mind. “Synthetic,” she said quietly, turning back to her drink. It wasn’t a compliment or an insult. She meant it no differently than she would have when she called someone sir or ma’am. She didn't usually address it if she noticed, not after Samuels. But this man was testing her patience and invading her space so she didn’t give him the usual courtesy of just silently acknowledging and accepting him as he was. 

“No.” 

This gave her pause. “No? Then what could you possibly want to talk about?”

The synthetic, man, whatever he was – she’d chosen to stop differentiating so much after Samuels and other androids she’d met – raised a glass of whiskey that he seemed to have acquired out of nowhere to his lips and sipped on it before answering. His answer wasn’t exactly what she expected. “Do you ever just want to go back?” he asked casually, like they hadn’t even been having a separate conversation before. 

“What?” She was taken aback, confused, you name it.  _What?_

Still unbelievably casual, he turned to look at her over his right shoulder almost the same way she’d first looked him. He just didn’t have to turn as far as she had earlier because they were seated next to each other. “Think about your life,” he said simply. “Everyone has things they’d go back and change if they could, Ripley.” 

She felt her eyebrows creeping upward. There was a lot to unpack here, from him and from herself. From him there was confidence, intrigue, a weird sense that he knew something he maybe shouldn’t, but also a sense that he didn’t know anything about her at all. From herself there was confusion, anger, a deep sadness that had just come out of nowhere, and a deep-seated distrust for every random stranger who wanted to talk to her. Especially strangers who inexplicably knew her name. “Okay,” she said eventually, but that was it. She wasn’t giving him shit. Not until she knew what the hell was going on and who he was. 

“Well?” he prodded. 

 _Well what?_  “Listen buddy, I don’t know what you’re playing at or who you are. I’m not here for a therapy session where we talk about our feelings and our difficult pasts. All right? I’m here for a drink, the same as any other night that I walk in here.” Her voice wasn’t exactly sharp, but she knew that he knew that she meant business. She was  _not_  presently in the mood to fuck around and hadn’t been in a very, very long time. She looked away and focused on her drink for a few seconds, downing the last of it and then staring at the ice cubes in the bottom as she considered what she could do to rid herself of this uninvited addition to her evening. 

“I see you’ve healed well enough,” he said, causing her to start and look at him suddenly. He was looking down at her wrist, exposed because she’d bent her arm to put her elbow on the bar and her long sleeve had ridden up her arm. Splotchy round scars stood out red and pink against her light skin, in the same shapes that the drops of molten metal had been when they dripped down and landed on her. 

She blinked once, mentally pulling a curtain in front of the memory of the white hot pain and the reason she’d been so eager to pull down the panels, so unwilling to wait around for them to cool after she cut through them with her torch. It was difficult to resist the urge to immediately tug her sleeve over the scars but she succeeded and just stared him down, deeply uncomfortable. 

“But,” he said, looking up from her scars and smiling at her like he was just in a  _great_ mood, “There will always be scars. The kind you don’t want to have to explain to anyone. The kind you can cover up with sleeves or vicious sarcasm. The kind you go to therapy for.” He paused for a beat. “The kind you don’t.” 

She felt her gaze harden as she stared at him. “Just tell me what you want,” she said. “You’re not going to get it, but at least tell me so I know.” 

He chuckled, genuinely amused. “I want you to have the chance of a lifetime and see it for the value it actually has.” 

“The chance of a lifetime. Wow, you’re really good at convincing people this isn’t a total scam,” she said with a false smile, snorting. 

“Ripley,” he said, and something about the sudden shift to serious in his face and voice caught her attention. “I don’t know you. I don’t know your story or what you’ve been through. I know it must have been a lot.” He gestured to her wrist briefly and then went on. “Everyone has something they’d like to go back and change.”

“What are you here for?” she demanded, tired of all the pretty words and the beating around the bush. 

“Would you go back if you could? If you could actually go back? Would you go back and change whatever it is that you carry around with you these days? It’s heavy. I can see it. They can. Everyone can.” He gestured vaguely to the room around them.  

“I guess I might,” she said, but her voice was strained, and now she felt angry. Attacked, provoked. Touched somewhere that hadn’t healed yet. “But I can’t.” She coughed, annoyed with her voice for nearly cracking as she spoke.  _Stop that. Don’t you dare._  

“And if you could? What would you change? You don’t have to tell me, Ripley. I’m sure there’s something you would change. Someone you would save?”

Her breath caught in her throat. She thought of a synthetic she’d known once, however briefly. A synthetic who had come to her because he wanted to include her in something that might bring her closure regarding her long lost mother. A synthetic who offered to help where he could when things went to shit. A synthetic who gave his life, knowing exactly what he was doing, so she could still get some closure. A Synthetic who had done more for her in the span of weeks and months than anyone she’d known besides her mother, the same mother who’d disappeared and wasn’t around to do those things for her anymore. 

Samuels had given his life for her. Was there some way she could have saved him?  _Bullshit. Not this again._ She thought about this too damn often, even now. The one question that had haunted her above everything else. Not, “Will the creatures show up here too?” Not, “Could I have done more to find my mom?” Not, “Did those people who were trying to kill me really deserve to die so I could live?” But, “Did I do the right thing in leaving him there? Could I have stopped him? Jump started him after he went down? Something?”  

She came back to the present and found the stranger staring at her. He seemed mighty pleased with himself. 

“So what?” she said, feeling increasingly cross with the emotions this shit was dredging up. “I can't go back. That’s not how it works. You live and you have regrets.  _That’s_ how it works.” 

He smiled. “What if it wasn’t?” 

She stared at him for a few seconds, trying to gauge just how full of shit he was. “You can’t,” she said simply. 

He sighed. “What if you could go back to whatever point in time you chose, but you wouldn’t remember this? You would lose everything you lived through after that point, and you wouldn’t have those memories.”

“Well then what’s the point of going back? Nothing is going to change if you don’t remember anything.” 

His smile widened.

 _Why? Oh, shit._  She realized she’d just humored his point, even if she hadn’t meant her words that way. 

“Your mind doesn’t remember, but your guts do.” 

“Oh, gee, that’s helpful,” she scoffed. But she couldn’t deny deep down inside, something about this idea fascinated her. 

His smile never faltered. “How often in your life have your guts gotten you through a bad situation, Ripley?” he asked. 

She frowned, recalling the times that fell under that category. There were, admittedly, a few. 

“Your guts don’t forget.  _That’s_ how you change things.  _That’s_ how you remember.” 

She thought about this for a while, kicking herself for letting him get to her but just tempted enough to let the idea of fixing things float through her mind. But then there was so much else mixed in. If she went back she had everything else to deal with, not just Samuels’ death. There was the entire ordeal of all of the people she’d killed, the people who had tried to kill her. The working joes. The  _creatures_. “Fuck,” she muttered. She looked up at him when she realized she’d said it out loud. 

“Tempting, isn’t it?” 

She laughed in his face. “You don’t know what kind of hell it was,” she said, frowning. “It’s not tempting to go back and do that shit all over again at all. Especially when I won’t know what’s coming, just like before. And  _shit,_ there was hell coming." 

He shrugged. “But the saving part. The  _fixing_ part. I just don’t want to see you throw away this opportunity, Ripley.”

Again, she scoffed. “What opportunity? You’re out here asking me to daydream about what would happen if I could go back and stop certain things from happening, do some things differently. Everybody daydreams about that. That doesn’t make it happen. It never has before.” 

He leaned back, setting down his now-empty glass. “I already told you, it can this time.” 

She shrugged. “Fine. What are the details? How do I go back? A time machine? A wormhole? I don’t suppose you’d like to drop a little pill in my drink?” 

He tapped the side of his own head. “You have to believe,” he said. 

“That’s it?”  _I’m floored. Amazing. Incredible. What a miracle._

Again, he chuckled. He was doing a lot of that, and she found it rather irksome. “That’s it, Ripley. Do you really want to go back, or not?” 

She rolled her eyes but chose to humor him. “I’d go back,” she said. She thought about that synthetic again.  _Samuels_. And the others. Ricardo.   _Axel_ , hell, even Waits. She didn’t want to. Not really. Not with everything else she’d had to deal with. But if she went back . . . admittedly, there were some heavy pros as well as cons. Not like it was going to happen though, so what the hell? 

“Do you know exactly when you would go back to?” 

She leaned forward on her elbows as she had earlier and thought for a moment. When would she go back to? There was no use going back to when she was a kid and trying to stop her mother from leaving on  _that_  trip. She’d only be running on gut feelings and as much as Ellen had loved her, the woman wouldn’t have had enough reason to stay. So then she wouldn’t go back  _that_  far. Maybe back on the station? If she didn’t have all of her memories, she couldn’t just stop a lot of the bullshit from happening first thing. But if she had her gut feelings, would they convince her not to leave  _the Torrens_  in the first place and get involved with Sevastopol’s crap?  _Back to the beginning._ She thought back to the real beginning, the day Samuels had first approached her regarding the flight recorder and the entire mission. “Yeah,” she heard herself say, pretty lost in the memory, even if only for a moment. 

Out of the corner of her eye she noticed him smile. She was distantly aware of him saying, “I’ll see you around, Ripley,” and rising from his stool. But she was so caught up in her memories . . . No, not even. That specific memory was running through her head, almost so strong that it was reverberating there. It felt like if she kept thinking about it she might fall right out of her barstool and back into the exact situation she was thinking about. Her head was buzzing. She heard a sound like someone snapping their fingers. She couldn’t see him anymore, but she could still hear him. He was still smiling, she could tell by the way he spoke. “. . . But you won’t see me.” 

 _And that was it._ Now it felt like she  _was_  falling out of her barstool, but moving as though she was stuck on the bottom of a pool filled with honey or some other thick, heavy liquid. And then – 

“Ripley?”

She turned to glance over her left shoulder and then back to her torch, cutting off the gas supply and effectively starving the flame. It went out and so did the sparks that had been flying moments before. She flipped up her welding mask and turned back to look at the intruder who had just entered her shop. 

“I’m Samuels. I work for the company.” 

That was all she needed to hear. She pulled her mask down over her face again and went back to what she’d been doing. She was uninterested in whatever Weyland-Yutani had to say to her at this moment, no matter who they’d sent to convey the message. 

But he just wouldn’t quit. “It’s about your mother. We think we may have found her, Amanda.” 

That stopped her. Now she set down the torch entirely and stood up. She flipped up her mask again and left it there, interested in what he had to say only because he’d mentioned her mother.  _Ellen Ripley. Mom._

“A commercial vessel,  _the_ _Anesidora_ , has recovered what we believe to be the flight recorder unit of  _the Nostromo_.” 

“Where?” Now she was interested. She moved away, suddenly intent on removing her mask. Something so familiar and protective had suddenly become a vice, squeezing her head and making her claustrophobic. 

“Zeta Reticula.” 

She set it on a tool bench and turned to face him again, noting that he’d followed her, always just a few steps behind. “What did it tell you?” 

“We don’t know.” It was obvious that he was concerned the answer wouldn’t be satisfactory. “The unit was taken to Sevatopol Station. It’s proprietorial material, so the company wants it to be collected as soon as possible.”

As he spoke she walked, and he followed. She stopped at the top of a short flight of steps out of the shop and he moved to stand beside her. “Sevastopol is a supply depot in the region. It's a . . . permanent freeport.” 

His explanation seemed innocent enough, but it still bothered her that he’d thought she would need one. “I know what it is.”  _Of course_ _I do. I’m an engineer._ She moved to grab a cup and get a drink, needing the sensation of something in her mouth to take off the sudden edge in her nerves. A taste, something,  _anything_ , would be enough to shock her system out of focusing solely on the chaotic mess of emotions that had abruptly started roiling inside of her. Even the shitty coffee on this station would be enough. 

This time Samuels did not follow her, but waited to see what she was doing, and then turned to face the port window and look out over the vast expanse of space beyond. “Transit’s arranged,” he said as he moved. “There’s a courier ship called  _the Torrens_  heading out that way in two days.” 

She continued to stare down at her drink as she listened, but she saw out of the corner of her eye that he had turned to face her again. 

“We’re going to travel out-”

“We?” she interrupted, jerking her head around to look at him. 

Samuels stared at her, studying her face for all of two seconds. “Me, and another exec,” he offered, eyes flicking away. 

She turned back to her drink, breathing out as quietly and slowly as she could.  _Right._ There was a lot to process here.  _Why tell me all of this, though? It’s not_ _like_ _the company to care._ She had turned entirely away from him, but shifted on her feet and moved to look at him again when he said more. 

“And you . . . If you’re willing.” 

She hadn’t yet had a chance to even sip the hot coffee in her cup, afraid it would scald her tongue.  _That_ would take her mind off of her feelings, but it wasn’t worth it. Now she handed him the cup and moved away, not trusting her own shaky hands to do the job of keeping it still enough that it wouldn’t spill. Or perhaps she would drop it. Either way, it was safer with Samuels. Why she handed it to him instead of just setting it on the counter beside them was beyond her. Maybe some instinct to present a guest with refreshments had kicked in. She wasn’t sure. 

No footsteps followed her, and she understood that he was letting her have her space. “Look, Ripley . . . When this job came across my desk, I read the case history.”  _Now_  he chose to move closer. 

She stared down at her feet, suddenly hyper aware of the sweat dripping down her face and neck and clinging to her clothes. She’d been sweaty from working when he arrived, and even Samuels was sporting a wet brow by the time he found her due to the heat inside the shop. But now she felt a cold chill, and the moisture clinging to her only made the sensation worse. 

He spoke slowly, and there was an odd emotion in his voice. “I know why you’re working in the region where she went missing.”

 Was he . . . invested in this? No one from the company had ever actually cared about her or her mother, just the lost contents of  _the Nostromo_ , whatever those had been, and the legal concerns of missing contracted employees. Some of them had families, children. The company’s best apology to her had been to offer her a place to work when she came of age. She hadn’t taken it for them. She’d taken it for her mother. For herself. She came back out of her thoughts very quickly when she realized he was still moving closer to her. Something in her face must have changed, because he bounced up onto the ball of his foot as he made his last step, and then rolled back the same distance he’d come forward, leaning away. He seemed suddenly aware of how close he was to her and the discomfort it caused, but that didn’t detract from his mission to speak whatever was on his mind. 

“You’re still looking, aren’t you?” His voice was soft, feeling. Not the cold, manipulative words she was accustomed to when speaking with representatives from the company. He was a few inches taller than her, not tall enough to look down at her in a superior way, but tall enough that he tilted his chin down slightly when he spoke to her. But only when he was this close. She looked away and down, eyes roving between the floor, her shoes, and the corner where the wall and the ground met each other. This was  _so much_. 

Samuels was still talking. 

“I’ve been cleared to offer you a place on  _the Torrens_ if you want to come along.” He paused before continuing, “Maybe, there’ll be some . . . closure, for you.” 

She squinted, feeling odd. Her own pulse pounded in her ears. This was her chance. She had to go. What kind of daughter would she be if she didn’t seek out every possible explanation and explore every available clue? Normally she would feel wary when someone from the company was around, especially to offer her something. Usually that was a trap, or came with a hefty expectation tied into the end of the contractual agreement. Weirdly, Samuels didn’t give her any of the usual feelings that most Weyland-Yutani execs did. She almost,  _almost_  felt like she could trust him. Or at the very least, like he wasn’t out to use her and give her as little in return as possible, like everyone else seemed to be. 


	2. The Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there and thanks for reading! I have to say, the coolest thing about posting this story so far is the number of people who have commented. Such a small fandom means people who keep an eye on these tags always see all of the new fics because there aren't very many of them. I am SO appreciative of everyone who took the time to comment on the first chapter. It's super motivating and exciting to see that people are actually interested. I hope I can do the story and the fandom justice. On another note, it's taking me a wildly longer amount of time to get through the game this playthrough because I'm doing it as meticulously as possible and pausing often to take lots of notes. I want my descriptions to be as accurate as possible so bear with me if my updates take some time to post. On those same lines, if you see something that I've described incorrectly or there are any mistakes please let me know! Any suggestions and comments are always welcome. Thanks again for reading!

She opened her eyes and exhaled, reaching up to press a hand against the glass above her. But it gave before she even touched it, rising up so she could sit up. Just a few years ago this would have hit her like a freight train, the waking up. Now it felt mildly uncomfortable, like a slight buzzing in her ears and a dry mouth. Her stomach wasn’t even upset. She shifted to swing her legs over the side of her pod and climbed to her feet, noting her thin legs as she did. They were certainly not weak, at least.  _Underwear and a tank top, the ideal sleepwear for long distance travel._ There was a screen on the wall directly across from the foot of her pod, blinking and waiting for her to sign in. She found her ID card and pushed it into the slot next to the screen, removing it when, “Welcome A. Ripley,” popped up in block letters. 

Then she turned to take a look around. The hypersleep chamber was the same as it had been when she’d first entered it before their flight, if not a tad bit messier now. Ash trays were randomly placed, each of them with cigarette butts ground down into them. Several magazines were lying around, and  _War in Totality_ , a hefty looking book by Frank Herman, was resting on the floor between her pod and someone else’s. She didn’t remember where everyone had slept, and the adjacent screens to the other pods now simply blinked, “User signed in,” as did her own. There were six pods in the room, arranged around a central pillar so that the head of each pod was relatively near the one next to it. And everything was orange and white. So much orange and white.

Taking the only door out of the room, she walked down the hall a few steps and then took a left through another door, remembering the brief tour they’d all been given before they took off. She was good with maps and  _great_ with schematics, and had taken some time to study those of _the Torrens_. She hadn’t spent long at it, but knew her way around well enough. She could easily picture the floor plan and doorways in her mind after only a short time spent with the paperwork. She passed through the door and walked down another hallway, this one much shorter. Lockers lined the wall to her left as she walked, and a small heap of luggage and boxes lay at the end with scattered paperwork on the floor in the corner. She took a right when she reached the corner and found herself in the bunk room. 

An access terminal was directly next to the door on one side, and a bed was on the other. There was a central space with a counter and many more lockers and small cupboards for personal effects. Three beds, a shower, and a toilet.  _Cozy_. She moved to her locker and got dressed, hardly self-conscious but still relieved once she was fully clothed. A screen on one wall showed the crew roster and listed all of them with their crew IDs and their current status. Everyone was signed in. Verlaine and a man named Connor were the only crew on  _the Torrens_ , and the Weyland-Yutani passengers were listed in the order of Samuels, then Taylor, and then Ripley. The thing that caught her eye was the Torrens core system output monitor chart below the crew roster itself. It showed their assigned ID numbers instead of their names, and then denoted the core system output for each individual. Ripley herself had the highest output, just a tick higher than that of Verlaine and Taylor. Connor was just below those two. It was Samuels’ block that made her stop and look closer, though. His output was half of Connor’s, if not a bit less. 

 _“My name is Samuels. I work for the company,”_ she recalled him saying.  _A synthetic. I hope they don’t own you, as well._  Knowing Weyland-Yutani, it was likely his freedoms weren’t as numerous as they seemed.

She moved on, stopping absently at the access terminal, automatically pressing a few buttons to open the most recent files. There was always a chance someone could have sent a message for her or the two Weyland-Yutani execs she was accompanying. A personal note from someone called Blane was addressed to Verlaine, and that was it. Something about a friend needing work if Verlaine had it, but Ripley only perused the letter and then closed out the file. It was a public terminal in the living space so if Verlaine had wanted the note to stay private, she could have locked it up or kept it under a separate folder. Not that Ripley had any desire to snoop anyways.

She walked back down the short hall and past the lockers, and then turned left. Not in an exploratory mood, per se, but Samuels and Taylor were somewhere on  _the Torrens_  and that somewhere obviously wasn’t the hypersleep chamber or the bunk room. If anything she’d make a loop and pass medical before the long hallway in front of her led her to the galley. From there it was a straight shot to the bridge. She had to bump into someone along the way. On her route she passed by the airlock and through a small chamber with space suits. She noted that there were four closets and only three suits, but didn’t dwell on it and kept walking. The door to medical was preceded by a large window on her right, and she saw Samuels on the other side. He was busy with a tablet in his hand, moving around the room in a very inquisitive manner. She watched him as she walked to the door, and he turned and greeted her as soon as he heard it open.

“Ah, Ripley.” 

“Samuels. Did you wake up early?” she asked, noting that he seemed very put together and awake already.  _You have brown eyes._ It was a random thought to occur to her as she looked at him, but there it was, random or not. Brown eyes and a curved nose. Not quite hooked and not too large for his face by any means, but definitely on the larger side as far as noses went. 

“Well, I don’t really need as much sleep as the rest of you.” He raised his shoulders in a half shrug and the movement extended down both arms as he spoke, sounding nonchalant but almost,  _almost_  self-conscious. They were dancing around the subject of his not being entirely human, of course. He paused a beat and said, “I was just inspecting  _the Torrens’_  facilities. A well-maintained ship. I realize it’s a very similar model to-”

“ _The_ _Nostromo_.” 

“Yes. M-Class. A later patent, but close.” He nodded. 

“I’ve worked engineering jobs on ships like this,” she said, by way of letting him know she was very aware of all the similarities between this ship and the one her mother had been on when she disappeared. 

Again, he shrugged. “Of course.” Then he seemed to switch gears. “Is Taylor up yet? She’s not a seasoned traveler. Hypersleep may have been punishing for her.” 

He was right. “I haven’t seen her. I’ll go check on her.” 

Samuels went back to what he’d been doing before and she turned to leave after a brief glance around the med bay. She continued down the original hallway that had led her to Samuels, passing through a makeshift storage room on her way. There was a ladder in the center but it was blocked by crates and boxes, and the rest of the room was stacked with piping and various cases and unused tablets. She came to a new hallway and glanced around before taking a left. If she’d gone right she would have wound up at the airlock again. Through one more door was the galley, and seated at the table in the middle was Taylor. 

“Taylor. Good morning.” She didn’t know what else to say. 

“Ripley. It’s certainly not good, and I very much doubt it’s morning, either.” She took a breath and her voice was a bit quieter and not so harsh when she spoke again. “Sorry.” She sighed. “I feel like death. I don’t know how you people put up with hypersleep regularly.”

“You get used to it.” 

Taylor gave the slightest shake of her head. “I don’t do long haul very often. Most legal execs don’t travel further than the coffee machine.”

She had a point. “I’m surprised Weyland-Yutani felt the need to send legal at all,” Ripley said honestly. 

Taylor seemed unsurprised. “The loss of  _the Nostromo_  and cargo cost the company a lot of money. It’s important we find out what happened. If I can close the case with a conclusive accident report, it’ll look great with my superiors.” She paused and looked down, realizing what she’d just said. "I'm sorry. That was insensitive. I realize . . . your mother has been missing for 15 years and you’ve-”

Ripley was hardly offended. “It’s okay. We’ll both get what we want, right?”  _What is it I want out of all this?_  

Taylor agreed easily enough. Then she asked, “Have you seen Samuels? He’s probably been up for hours.” There was a familiarity in her voice when she talked about him, and Ripley wondered if that meant they’d done much business together in the past. 

Ripley nodded, now thinking of Samuels. She briefly considered the shade of amber that his eyes were under the bright, unyielding medical lights and wondered how the color might change in something softer and more natural. She shook her head slightly to rid herself of the thought and got a good look at the room around her now that the conversation was over. To her right waited a counter full of varying cereals and breakfast foods. To her left, a cubby of sorts with benches for seating. Directly next to her sat a beanbag chair, and in front of her the table waited. The cubby contained an access terminal, which she found held a single file. Communications between Taylor and a higher executive on her team regarding  _the Nostromo_  incident. Missing the year 2122, file #DS9398476. She hated that. Her entire life, the loss of her mother and  _the Nostromo_  had been boiled down to a series of numbers. The date it happened. The ID numbers of the crew. The amount of money the company lost. The number of people on board. The length of their last received transmission.

 She had only just gotten ahold of some food when Verlaine’s voice came over the loud speaker. 

“All personnel to the bridge. Approaching Sevastopol Station.” 

Ripley scooped a few bites of cereal into her mouth, reminding herself that there would be food on the station. She never had much of an appetite after long periods spent in hypersleep, anyways. “Looks like we’re up.” 

Taylor had been sitting at the table still, leaning over a granola bar and clearly wishing there were some way to end the effects of hypersleep on her unaccustomed body. Now she straightened, obviously eager to be doing something other than suffering in a hard chair on an unfamiliar ship. She got up and Ripley followed her down the hall and through the door, stopping just inside the bridge. Taylor stood on her right, and Samuels on her left. Verlaine was in front of them and Connor was out of sight, probably manning the controls further forward in the ship. 

As soon as she entered, Verlaine addressed them all. “Hope you all had a restful journey.” 

Ripley turned to look at Samuels when he spoke. “ _The Torrens_  is in very good order for an old M-Class, captain.”

Verlaine nodded. “She was a wreck when I bought her. Took a few years and a lot of contracts to refit, but she pays for herself now.”

“You said we’re approaching Sevastopol Station,” Taylor said. “Are we docking?”

“I believe your contact is Marshal Waits, is that right? I’ll hail Sevastopol and arrange boarding with him.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Ripley saw Taylor’s shoulders go limp in relief. “Good. Let’s get this over with.”

Verlaine smiled at her, obviously aiming at being encouraging. “Don’t worry, Ms. Taylor, routine. In and out.” She turned. “Connor, how we doing?” 

From behind rows of seats and monitors Connor’s voice boomed out, needing no comms or speakers to make him audible. “ISMG loaded and calibrated. Approach vector locked.”

“Prep comms so I can say hello.” This was obviously a common exchange for them. It sounded so natural, the going back and forth. 

“Channel open, captain.” 

This seemed to be the end of their conversation. Samuels turned to regard his two female colleagues. “Does everyone have their briefing documents?” 

Taylor nodded. Ripley moved up to where Verlaine had just been standing and took hers off of the desk. She walked to the front of the bridge to stand near one of the two front-facing full length windows, flipping through the documents contained in her folder as she went. Careful not to bump into anyone or anything on her way, she looked up from her folder when Samuels came to stand beside her, looking out the same window. Neither of them said anything and they shared a quiet moment just staring out into space. 

“You can watch the approach on the monitors,” Verlaine said as she passed them on her way to her seat. 

Samuels then moved away to look at the aforementioned monitors, Ripley assumed. She joined him and Taylor as they approached the station, standing the same way they had when they first arrived on the bridge. 

“Can we see it?” Samuels asked. 

Verlaine turned to Connor. “Switch to monitors.” 

He pressed one button and then another on the board in front of him. 

Ripley caught herself leaning forward as soon as the screens changed and was slightly embarrassed until she realized her colleagues were doing the same. 

“Sevastapol Station,” Verlaine said as the image came into sharper focus. 

Now Ripley  _did_ lean forward, going so far as to step closer to the screen. “Is that damage?” 

Samuels moved closer as well. “It looks like damage,” he agreed immediately. 

Verlaine didn’t take her eyes off the monitor in front of her. “Punch up 74. Tight angle.” 

Connor did as he was told and the image in front of them changed, closer and clearer now than before. “Looks like the dry dock bay is screwed,” he observed. 

They all looked to Verlaine. Her expression was one of obvious confusion. “I can’t bring  _the Torrens_  into that.” She was just voicing what had already occurred to all of them. Now Verlaine was on comms, trying to contact the station. “This is the commercial vessel  _Torrens_  out of Saint Clair, registration #MSV-7760 calling Sevastopol traffic control. We're carrying three passengers on a Weyland-Yutani bond, you’re holding  _the Nostromo_  flight recorder unit. We request immediate permission to transfer the passengers portside, over.” She reached and flipped an overhead switch on the comms, and static blared from the speakers. 

“. . . This is Waits, colonial marshal of Sevastopol Station . . .” The words were barely understandable through the static, and it was obvious there was much being said that wasn’t getting through. “. . . Serious situation . . .” The man’s voice cut out and there was only static feedback on the line. 

“Marshal?” Verlaine asked. Connor leaned forward in his seat and fiddled with multiple dials in front of him while she spoke, trying for a better connection. “Hello, Marshal? This is  _the Torrens_. Say again?” 

There were more words now, but they ran together and the hissing, crackling background noise was overpowering them. Not even one full word made it through, either drowned out or too choppy to understand. 

Something in Ripley’s stomach had dropped when she initially saw the damage on the station, but the added problems with comms only made the feeling worse. She felt antsy and her fight or flight instincts seemed to be on high alert.  _Flight, not fight._ The desire to move away, to back off, to convince everyone to turn around and fly home was so strong in her that for a moment she pressed her lips together hard and bit the insides of them, worried she might say something she didn’t mean. It would be mortifying to let something that sounded so fearful and conspiratorial slip right now. The faces of her fellow crew mirrored her concern, but only to a point. Maybe the panic she felt was just a symptom of how close she finally was to finding answers about her mother.  _You’ve traveled before_ , she reminded herself sharply.  _There have been issues before. It’s always been all right. But this gut_ _feeling ._ _. ._  she couldn’t shake it but kept her mouth shut as discussions began about what to do. 

She had to find out about her mother. She had to know everything there was about what had happened to  _the Nostromo_. Turning around now would be like throwing away the opportunity of a lifetime. Something about that specific thought sent her into a tailspin of new emotions, but she didn’t understand them. They were out of place here, nostalgic, almost like a distant memory. Separate from the panic and instinct to flee but related in a detached sort of way. People were talking. Ripley tore herself out of her own mind and came back to the present, focusing on what was being said in an effort to distract herself. 

The decision was made that Samuels, Taylor, and Ripley would use a line to bus themselves from  _the Torrens_  to Sevastopol. It was several hundred yards across from the airlock of  _the Torrens_  to one of the stations’ emergency airlocks, but they would be equipped with their suits and rope ascension devices to pull them along without effort. They didn’t have much choice in the matter as the docking situation wasn’t workable and the communications hadn’t exactly been enlightening. 

“Station’s comms seem pretty screwed up, so I fitted Samuels’ suit with a radio booster.” Verlaine was walking from one of them to the next, setting oxygen tank valves and tugging on helmets to be sure their suits were secure. She ended with Samuels and waited for him to turn around and face her before she told him, “I can only keep  _the Torrens_  in transit for 24 hours.” 

Samuels nodded. “You’ll have heard from us by then.” 

“Safe trip.” She left the chamber. 

Ripley stepped into the airlock first, with Samuels and then Taylor following. “Stand by,” she said, as the alarm began whooping at them from overhead, warning that the airlock’s outer doors would soon be engaged. 

“My contract doesn’t cover bloody space walks,” Taylor huffed as she got in line, clearly several kinds of not okay with this situation. 

“It’s the only option,” Ripley reminded her. “And it’s perfectly safe if you do what I tell you.” 

Taylor and Samuels switched places so that the least experienced of them could be in the middle spot in line, and the door behind them closed. The alarm was louder now, and a loud hissing noise erupted. 

“Depressurizing,” Ripley narrated, staring straight ahead. Something about all of this felt so  _wrong_ , but maybe she was just letting Taylor’s fast, nervous breathing get to her. It was just the combination of strange events, that was all. That had to be it. 

“Hating this,” Taylor was narrating her own experience. 

Ripley blinked and took a deep breath. “Just shadow me, Taylor.” As an afterthought, she added, “You too, Samuels.” 

“Affirmative.” His response was immediate and rather lacking in the level of emotion that all of Taylor’s words held. He sounded ready. 

The door ahead of them opened and Sevastopol came into view, so much brighter than the dark airlock they’d been shut in moments before. It took a matter of moments to set up the line and then their devices, and then they began their journey across.  _Trek_  would have been the wrong word for it, because they weren’t exerting any effort beyond what it took to hold on to the handles of the machines that pulled them along so smoothly. 

“What the fuck happened here?” Ripley murmured as they crossed. She wasn’t asking anyone who could currently give her answers, but she knew her colleagues were wondering the same thing. The damage was so much more obvious when they were this close to the station. 

“My god, Ripley,” Taylor said. She sounded more frightened each time she spoke. 

Ripley turned to look over her shoulder at Taylor as far as she could. She could just barely manage to see her because the suit wouldn’t let her turn farther. “You’re doing good, Taylo-”

Something blew ahead of them with a blinding flash of light and a wave of energy that jolted them as it passed.  _Shit._ Shrapnel from any explosion was dangerous, but this one was large enough to dislodge some massive pieces of the station. Debris that easily matched  _the Torrens_  in mass hurdled at them. 

“Just keep moving!” She didn’t mean to sound so panicked, but this situation had just gone from manageable to dire.  _The line . . ._  

Taylor’s breathing was loud over their comms, filling Ripley’s ears. She didn’t exactly fault her for it, too busy to focus on how her own breathing sounded, but  _god_ it was hard to focus with so much noise. A huge structure came at them, probably an entire support beam for a smaller platform, and Taylor screamed. 

“Taylor, Ripley, hold on!” Samuels’ voice was a different thing entirely than the unperturbed, casual way it had sounded earlier. 

 _It won’t help._ The beam moved too fast for them to do anything but hold their handles tighter and watch in horror as it came at them. It hit the line and there was an instant where they felt the impact before the tension snapped it and the beam moved on.  _No._ The vacuum of space smothered noises in the open, but they could hear what they touched. The sound of the line snapping came right through their hands. It was a terrible noise. None of them could have kept hold of the line when it broke because the two pieces flew apart, with the broken beam still whizzing through the middle of them. All three of them were more or less launched away from the point of impact. 

Ripley was fortunate enough to be launched in the same direction as her piece of line, and she managed to reach out and grab hold of it before it whipped out of reach. Her grabbing it did nothing to slow its momentum, though, and she found herself hurdling towards the emergency airlock door. She crashed into the railing beside it and scrambled to catch a handle on something, anything, to stop her from bouncing back out into oblivion. The impact jarred her whole body but it was her helmet that struck first, and a high pitched ringing started in her ears.  _No. Damn it. No._ _Please ._ _. ._  Her fingers felt thick and heavy in the gloves on her suit, and the impact had left her with less feeling in her extremities. She wasn’t sure if they weren’t moving at all or if they were and she just couldn’t tell. Ripley just managed to curl her fingers around the rail in time and pulled herself against it, clinging to it with both hands. 

The sudden silence was broken only by her heavy breathing, but she became aware of the fact that there was no sound of Taylor’s breathing, or Samuels’ voice. It was too quiet. Either comms in her suit had cut out entirely or something had happened to her colleagues.  _Fuck._ Maybe they just weren’t saying anything. She kept a tight hold on the rails but turned to look around. “Samuels! Taylor! Respond, anybody!”  _Nothing_. 

The sound of her own panicked voice brought her back from the edge of hysteria. “Okay,” she said to herself, reaching for the handle to manually open the airlock beside her. It clanked heavily as she pulled it down, and the emergency doors sprang open.  _Okay_. She pulled herself in, careful to always have at least one hand wrapped firmly around something so she couldn’t float away.  _Get inside, pressurize the airlock, get help._ She made it inside and pulled another handle, and the doors slammed shut. Jets of air burst all around her as soon as it shut, but she couldn’t hear them properly until the room pressurized. As soon as any semblance of gravity kicked in, she dropped out of the space she’d been floating in and hit the floor.  _Ow._ It was only a few feet to fall, but the floor was hard and she landed on her stomach. The jolt knocked the wind out of her and she curled in on herself as much as the suit would allow, gasping for air. 

Her eyes were squeezed shut and she just laid there for she didn’t know how long, losing track of time because all she cared about was getting breath in her lungs. On the bright side, this second impact seemed to have knocked the ringing out of her ears. When she did open her eyes she realized there were alarms blaring and red lights flashing overhead. She blinked, noting that the ringing was gone but now sounds seemed distant and hazy, almost like her head was in a bubble. Maybe it was just the suit. She got up slowly, aware of the fact that any normal station would have dispatched security and potentially emergency medical officers to come and investigate.  _There's no one here_. Maybe they were on their way. 

That same aching, panicky feeling was back, but she chalked that up to everything that had just happened. She needed to get help, needed to find Samuels and Taylor. Surely there were people on their way to see what the hell was going on. Surely she’d step out of the airlock and they would be waiting for her, or not far beyond. The door opened and she hesitated before stepping through. An emergency light was on in the center, but that was it.  _Dark. Boxes._ This didn’t look organized or well kept at all. No primary lighting flicked on when she entered the room. Maybe because it was an emergency airlock and didn’t see a lot of use?  _Maybe._ A twisting sensation in her gut told her otherwise but she told it to fuck right off. She just needed to get out of this suit and take a few seconds to catch her breath. Someone would probably show up by then and they could get everything sorted out. That same sensation persisted.  _Probably_. 


	3. Dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter feels SUPER heavy because there's so little dialogue besides what's going on in Ripley's head, so let me know if it's too much. Bear with me because this is the beginning of the game and they do start you out relatively slow to let you get a feel for things and to get you properly freaked out before anything exciting happens. I realize I'm writing in a lot of details but I think realistically, Ripley would be noticing many of these details until later when she's too busy hiding/fighting for her life to pay attention to all of them. In an emergency situation you become hyper-aware and things stand out to you that might not in normal circumstances. I'm also still totally getting a feel for how to write it when she finds or crafts items. If you think my descriptions of things are confusing or can be improved in any way, let me know! I am here for constructive criticism because I want this to be a story people can enjoy whether they've played/watched the game or not. Either way, things are just going to get more exciting from here on out, trust me. Thanks again for reading! I'm LOVING all the feedback.

No one was waiting for her beyond the first door, or the next. Only dimly lit rooms and dark hallways greeted her one after the other. She’d passed a central monitor station in the center of one room, but it was inaccessible. There wasn’t time to open and sift through boxes for anything of use, but Ripley’s eyes, sharp even in the low lighting, caught the red of an unused flare on top of one pile. She took it. The hesitation that would normally have set in about snatching up random items in a strange place was smothered by the eerie darkness and that terrible gut feeling that something here was  _very fucking wrong_. It was so dark, maybe the flare would come in handy. Maybe she could use it to get some help. She tucked it in one of her pockets and continued on. Some doors were blocked entirely, either by boxes or entire pallets of heavy pipes and other supplies. Some of them simply had no power or were jammed.

She had no choice but to leave the dim lighting of this hallway and pass into the much darker space to her right. This hall was lit, but so badly that the room behind her felt almost sunny and bright. She moved at an even pace, unwilling to make unnecessary noise due to the twisting sensation that was still present in her stomach. But she wasn’t crawling or creeping along, either. She had to find help, and there was business to attend to after that. Her hope was that this part of the station was just so unused that it had more or less become a storage space.  _Hopefully_. As she moved into a new room, the lights cut out entirely and the station shuddered around her. Dust fell from the ceiling vents above in silty clouds and she involuntarily gasped as the floor shifted beneath her.  _What the fuck_? 

The tremors ended as suddenly as they’d began and the lights came back on. After the sudden darkness they almost seemed sort of bright but as soon as her eyes adjusted, the comfort they gave her was gone. A female voice came over the speakers, obviously prerecorded and obviously automated. “Warning: Sevastopol stability compromised. Proceed to the nearest marshal checkpoint and stand by while orbital stabilizers are realigned.”  _Um. Excuse me?_ At least that explained the shaking. But it wasn’t comforting in any sense, and she had no idea how to find the nearest marshal bureau. 

She kept walking, beginning to feel more anxious about this entire situation by the second. Every corner she turned or door she looked through was dark or dimly lit, and full of random boxes and crates. She came around a turn and slowed her pace considerably; ahead the entire floor was screwed for several feet with panels missing and pipes visible. She was also pretty sure she could see fire. There were orange cones set up on both sides of the gap in the floor and yellow caution signs, too. As she got closer, one of the pipes blew and a jet of flame shot up several feet towards the ceiling. 

“Shit.” She fell back a step and hissed the word without thinking about it, looking around again. Her only other option was a door to the left that was blocked by its own small collection of pipes, crates, and barrels, all stacked on or around more pallets.  _How the hell . . ._  The raspy sound of metal on metal made her turn to look back at the jet of flame. It lasted only a moment and then stopped, but a few seconds later she heard it again. She investigated, stepping as near to the fucked flooring as she was willing. A wall vent.  _Really?_ Better than nothing, she supposed. The longer she stayed here, the longer she risked being directly involved when that pipe actually blew for real and this whole hallway was bathed in flame. She had to get closer to the fire pillar than she really wanted in order to crawn up into the vent, but seeing as she didn’t have any other options, she did what she had to do. Nothing got singed on her way by, so that was a plus. The vent closed behind her after she got in, and she wondered if the motion of the fire had been what set it off to open in the first place. These things were generally equipped with motion sensors on both sides of the vent openings so that engineers could easily get in and out of them. The biggest problem on large stations like this was that kids often got lost in the vents or played in them, which was dangerous. 

There were construction lights strung up in this vent, which she appreciated. They were brighter than the lights in the hall had been even with the flames. The same tremors from earlier struck again and she stopped crawling, bracing herself with both hands on the shaft walls beside her. The lights flickered out and then came back on, and she kept crawling. She was still far too close to the blown pipe for comfort.  _Not that any of this is comfortable_. She turned a corner in the vents and came out the other side, down the hall a ways from the gap in the floor and on the opposite side than where she’d started.  _This is progress_ , she reminded herself, but the thought wasn’t exactly cheerful. More darkness and random stacks of supplies awaited her on this side, which wasn’t exactly what she’d been hoping for. She followed the hall, ignoring doors that were obviously not functional, and found her way into a medium sized octagonal room. This one contained a functioning access terminal, and she opened the folder eagerly, hoping for some kind of an explanation or a way to signal for help. 

Nothing but corrupted files and a decommissioning notice from the chief to the engineering team waited for her, unfortunately. She leaned away from the terminal in frustration and took another look around the room. There were two doors across from each other, labeled  _Spaceflight_ Terminal and  _Employee Lounge_ , but one had no power to it and the other was blocked off by more crates and barrels.  _God damn it_. Ahead of her there was  _another_  gap in the floor, this one stretching longer than the last. No fire here. Yet. Someone had come up with the bright idea of placing two metal struts across the hole as a rickety bridge, end to end. There was no vent to save her this time.  _Of all the dumb shit I’ve had to do over the years_. . . Skeptically she approached and began her crossing, balancing with her arms stretched out. She made it over one strut and stepped onto the second one, fully aware of the fact that her luck was so bad, it would be completely unsurprising if another one of those station-wide shudders hit right about now. 

Maybe it was a tremor or maybe the metal beneath her feat just shifted. She didn’t exactly have time to look into it deeply though, because she took another step and then she was falling.  _Shit!_ It wasn’t terribly far, maybe about 15 feet at most, but the floor below still rose up far too quickly for any kind of soft or measured landing. When she got her bearings she found herself in  _another_  dark area.  _Surprise, surprise._ But while the above space had obviously been functional for walking and such, this was not. She was standing on a wide black conveyor belt at the head of a tunnel of sorts. Holding and processing for luggage and personal effects coming through receiving and departures.  _Lovely_. This entire system was obviously shut down. Baggage was here and there on the stopped belts, some looking like it hadn’t moved for some time. She could convince herself that the area near the emergency airlock was just being used for storage, but this . . . Any professional shutdown of a section like this would have seen all of the luggage removed and the conveyors cleared out. That had obviously not happened here. 

It was also dark here, darker than above and  _maybe_  as dark as the worst of the hallways she’d been through. That nagging feeling was back, the one that whispered about things gone terribly wrong in this place.  _What am I supposed to do?_ She argued with her own instincts.  _Go back the way I came? Not an option._  She got to her feet and made her way forward, unable to ignore it when the shaking and flickering lights she’d experienced before persisted from time to time. The dust from the ceiling had her needing to cough, but for some reason she felt like she shouldn’t do that down here. It was too dark and she was too alone, and there wasn’t any noise besides the creaking of the station around her. Nothing to buffer the sound of her clearing her throat, even.

Her eyes were still adjusting, but it was then that she started to notice the graffiti on the walls.  _That_  left her feeling more uncomfortable than before simply because of the implications that such illicit artwork naturally had.  _Nothing I haven’t seen before_ , she reminded herself. But then her eyes adjusted more and she could read what the words said. 

“You always know a working joe!” in large letters, and painted directly over top of it, “SOMEONE KNEW”. And if that weren’t disturbing enough, “Strangers will be SHOT” waited for her when she turned a corner. 

 _Just some kids, probably_. Fucking around in an area that had been shut down for whatever reason, spray painting whatever they wanted because they thought it looked cool or sounded edgy.  _Probably_. Another tremor took her mind off of the graffiti, even if only for a moment. She’d been walking along the conveyor belt, picking her way around the randomly strewn luggage and half wondering if she should be looking for some way to defend herself. Now she stopped in front of a clogged baggage processing conveyor and scanner. There didn’t seem to be a way around, so after a moment of uncertainty she bit the bullet and crawled underneath. The strips of plastic at the entrance slipped over her shoulders in a way that made her shudder even though they never touched her bare skin. 

Crawling through the other side, she breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of a dimly lit ladder with nothing blocking the base. A thick barrier stood between the conveyor she was on and the walkway where the ladder waited, and for a moment she considered trying to climb the barrier. Then a button familiar to one she often used in her work caught her eye and she walked over, pressing it without considering the consequences. The luggage ramp beside her began to slowly lower from its upright position, opening a gap in the barrier fence for her to move through. But as soon as she touched that damned button a loud, blaring screech sounded. It repeated itself twice after that and she flinched every time, too aware of the silence around her being broken and the fact that if someone was coming, she wouldn’t be able to hear them over the noise. The sound stopped as soon as the ramp was lowered and she quickly moved to the ladder, eager to see what waited back up in the land of the living. Not that she’d seen a goddamn thing here to prove that there was life on this station, but still.  _At least I haven’t seen anything dead_. 

Climbing the ladder, short as it was, reminded her of the tumbles she’d taken inside of the station and out. She’d absolutely sprained an ankle and the muscles in her butt protested to the climbing. She had no doubt if she checked in a mirror at some point later on there would be fresh bruises in her skin. Her shoulder was sore from the wrenching yank it had taken after she got hold of the snapped line earlier, and she was grateful for the reprieve as soon as she reached the top of the ladder. She technically should have medical attention but there were some other priorities a little higher on her list right now. Here she found herself in a small room, with nothing interesting behind her and a single door leading out to her right. A radio was playing at medium volume, and she reached out to turn it off but then thought better of it. The sudden silence that followed if she did shut off the noise might be just as disturbing as making noise in an already quiet atmosphere. 

There was nothing of interest in this room besides more stacked boxes and such, so she went to the door. The room it opened into was much larger than anything she’d been in so far, and dark. She stepped in slowly, peering around. “Hello?” she whispered as the door closed behind her, “Anyone here?” 

This was  _Departures_. A few paces ahead sat a very large model of Sevastopol Station, but the information screen on the front was a blank white sheet and the model itself occasionally sparked. It didn’t glow like she assumed it was supposed to, and wires from the ceiling hung down, sparking every time the model did. It was an eerie representation of what she’d seen of the station so far. The thought was a tad unnerving.  _Is the rest of Sevastopol like this? Where_ _are_ _the people? What happened?_  

Beyond the model there was a large expanse of room before it ended with a central office. A set of stairs rose on either side of the office, but those were mostly obscured in the dark from where she was now. Doors to her left and right were labeled  _Gate A_ and  _Gate B._ Both doors had lights that glowed red, indicating that there was power to them, but they were locked. She began to make her way cautiously across the room, instinctively staying in the shadows. An overturned and broken emergency flood light shot a dim line up the wall, but it wasn’t enough to properly illuminate the space. Barricades were haphazardly standing and lying in front of the stairs on the left, so she took those on the right. There was more graffiti here. 

“Forgotten? F.U.” 

“This life for rent”

“Tomorrow Together = No Future” 

“Welcome to the end of the line.” 

These were getting vaguely threatening.  _Not that_ strangers will be shot _is anything_ but _threatening_. 

She reached the top of the stairs and noticed a glowing map terminal on the wall to her right.  _Yes_. She breathed out heavily as she scanned the details of the schematics, needing only a few seconds to memorize what she’d seen.  _I need to get through_. She walked to the office door, relieved when it opened for her. Opposite of it was a door labeled  _Security Checkpoint_ , but it had no power. “Doesn’t anything here work?” she muttered, getting tired of the bullshit feeling that she was being forced to run a maze set up by psychopaths. Maybe the office would have what she needed. 

 _Surprise._ It actually did. A lovely little 2000-KJVS generator was waiting for her in the wall to her left.  _Finally_. She gripped the handle and pumped it downward three times before pressing the button.  _Yes!_  Lights flickered on and the comforting whir and rumble of all the various technology powering up in the room surrounded her. The access terminal in the office came to life and she swiftly moved towards it. Something she’d never heard before, a strange, hissing screech in the distance made her stop and listen. It lasted longer than a full second and then it was quiet, leaving her to wonder what it was. Some kind of machinery? It sounded almost . . . animal. Certainly not human.  _Machinery_ , she thought to herself with a decisive nod. 

This access terminal contained more than she’d found in the others so far. Something from someone named Anna to another someone named Langley about moving a stash of supplies. A security code was mentioned, and it stuck in Ripley’s mind.  _0340_. That was obviously a more private message but as it was on the public channel, she read it anyway. Then there was a public notice titled  _Goodbye from_ _Seegson_  regarding the decommissioning of the station. She opened an audio file next and stared at the title before hitting play. The description just read  _Kill the Power_. A man’s voice came over the terminal’s speaker and Ripley thought she recognized it. 

“Harris? Turner? Get back here now. We have a track, somewhere in Engineering. Lock the terminal down, kill the power, and don’t forget your reports. Make them thorough; we’re going to need our paperwork to be bulletproof when this shit’s over. Waits out.” 

 _Marshal Waits_. 

She stared at the description for the audio for a few seconds, considering everything that had been said. A track? Kill the power? Bulletproof reports . . .  _What the hell are you up to?_  

Then there came the utility section of the terminal. Power Junction D-13: Departures.  _Thank god._ Ripley was the opposite of religious, but the idea behind the thought fit here. She selected  _Restore Power to Departures_  and hit enter, standing up abruptly when the two doors she’d passed earlier, Gates A and B, opened. There was shouting. 

“Let’s get out of here!” a woman yelled. 

Ripley saw two figures race from one door to the next. One more person lagged a few steps behind, this one definitely identifiable as male when he spoke. “I’m going, I’m going!” 

Having looked past the model of Sevastopol to see them, she noticed that the lights were on and the miniature station looked almost as it should. One had to ignore the surrounding damage in the room to see this, but still. She moved quietly but relatively quickly down to investigate the doors that had just been used but found them locked and unresponsive.  _So much for human contact._ Restoring power to Departures seemed to have kicked the overhead speakers back on. This time the automated voice was distinctly male. “Welcome to Sevastopol Station, your home away from home.” 

Ripley snorted softly.  _Oh yeah, I’m feeling more at home by the minute._ The dry sarcasm in her thoughts died as soon as she climbed the stairs again and passed through the door into the security checkpoint.  _Jesus. Does every room in this place just look increasingly worse than the last one?_  If that was the case, she only had so far to go before rooms were completely destroyed or blown open and exposed to space itself. The place was a mess. Lights were cut, some dangling from the ceiling, and frayed or snapped wires hung down in multiple places. Occasionally a small shower of sparks burst from the end of one or all of them. Her only way forward seemed to be through one of the checkpoint lines, and the only open avenue placed her directly under a dangling wire. It reached all the way down to her waist from the paneling overhead. Hating every second of this, she knelt and crawled underneath the exposed wire, wondering if hoping that no sparks would come now was going to get her into as much trouble as hoping for no tremors while balancing across metal struts had earlier.

There was more graffiti in this room. It seemed to be getting more and more prevalent. 

“APOLLO”

Some of the same things were scrawled here as she’d seen before; “Tomorrow Together = No Future”. 

There were also signatures and symbols she couldn’t make sense of. She didn’t spend any extra time trying. At the end of the security checkpoint was a door leading to the  _Spaceflight Terminal Passenger Lounge_. It opened automatically when she stepped close enough, but then she just stood there for a few seconds, stunned. “What the hell happened here?” 

She stepped inside after taking some time to stare, eyes passing over the signs above her and then the rest of the space. It was a curved expanse with a ceiling high enough to hold two levels worth of shops and seating lounges. The sign directly overhead when she entered listed  _elevators, gift shop, baggage claim,_ and  _station maintenance_  with corresponding arrows to point people in the right direction. There was a set of stairs directly to her right when she entered, and further exploration revealed a twin set on the opposite end of the vast room. All of the shops were closed with their shutters pulled down. She jumped when something crashed in the distance, but it was too far away for her to have any idea what might have caused it. 

More of the same graffiti marked the walls and shutters here from place to place. Most notable among the newer messages was, “Fuck Seegson”.  _Lovely_. What kind of anarchy had taken over this place? 

The room was somewhat curved with the wall of the station, and as she came around the corner she could see that one of the massive room pillars had fallen and blocked the far stairs. The impact of its fall had impaled it into the flooring below and some of the panels there were bent and warped, leaving large gaps like the one she’d tried to cross before. The doors to both maintenance and the baggage claim wouldn’t budge. 

“Strangers will be shot” was on the wall again. The more she saw it the less at ease she felt. Not that this place had done anything in the way of making her feel at all comfortable and safe. This was the actual official lounge for all spaceflight passengers on this station, coming and going. This was no back-room emergency airlock.  _Something happened here._ Something was very, very wrong. The feeling of discomfort and near panic she’d experienced earlier had been getting stronger but now it was almost a dull sensation, like she’d passed the point of return and gone straight into something terrible. She’d certainly never been in a situation like this before, but an oddly persistent nudge in the back of her mind made it feel  _almost_  familiar in some way. Not as if she’d been here, but as if she’d heard about it and then dreamt of it once. Or something distant like that. 

Ripley moved back toward the end of the room that she’d entered and took the staircase there to the upper level, finding more destruction and mess there. They couldn’t be seen from the floor below but up here she was directly across from a number of very large windows in the wall that allowed her to see the gas giant and the stars. She’d only just reached the top and begun to look around when  _the Torrens_  came into view through the window, keeping its distance for safety but close enough to obviously be orbiting this particular part of the station. Her breath caught in her throat. 

“ _The Torrens!_  I’m here. I’m right here. Verlaine!” She barely dared to raise her voice, hoarsely whispering more than even really speaking out loud. As if in reaction to her call for help, a short alarm went off and the window shutters began to close before the ship was even out of sight. “God damn it!”  _No use now._ She turned away from the closed shutters, noting how much darker it was in the lounge without the light from outside.  _Damn._  She thought she heard another one of those strange noises from earlier, but couldn’t quite tell over the din as the shutters locked. Like a weird, distant shriek. The door nearest the top of the stairs was completely blocked off because the ceiling panels in front of it had come down at some point, and a disaster of pipework and live wires had come with it. They sizzled and sparked dangerously and Ripley didn’t even entertain the idea of trying to worm her way through them without getting zapped. 

She moved on, occasionally casting wishful glances at the blocked windows.  _God damn it._ The seating lounge up here was relatively large, but empty. Not even a stray magazine graced the orange chairs or their corresponding coffee tables. There was more graffiti here than there had been down below. “Keep Out” or a large red X were scrawled on many of the closed storefronts and doors. 

“You always know a working joe!” 

“Welcome to the end of the line.” 

And then in block letters, “WE NEED HELP”. She clenched her jaw and moved on, unable to shake the feeling that she wasn’t doing herself any favors by digging further into this place. Her route took her across the upper level and then down the set of stairs that had been blocked off from the floor by the fallen pillar. She didn’t have a lot of room, but enough to safely get from the stairs to the tiny plaza beyond. Xing Xang and CredOp Amusements were the only storefronts here, and a nonfunctional vidcom station stood in the center of the floor. CredOp was actually not shuttered in like the rest of the shops – or if it was once, the shutter had been pried upwards and now only hung down a couple of feet – and she cautiously moved inside. Two air hockey tables and a couple of random game machines were uncovered, but the rest that lined the walls were draped in gray cloth to keep out the dust. She found another flare here. It was an odd place for such an item, but she wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. A flare was better than nothing, and two flares were more useful than one. 

Another 2000-KJVS wall generator greeted her from a corner and she smiled in spite of this shitty situation. She’d almost thought this was going to be a dead end. Three pumps on the handle and a button press later, the arcade machines beeped and bumbled to life. The soft humming of the air hockey tables made her skin prickle rather than comforting her because it was so noisy, though, and she instinctively crouched a bit closer to the machines as she made to leave the shop. Maybe now one of the doors would work for her. The door to Xing Xang sprang open when the power returned, but Ripley hung back. Lights inside filtered through the door and Ripley couldn’t be positive, but she thought she saw a humanoid shadow cross the doorway. She waited for a few moments, straining her ears for the slightest sound, but there was nothing. 

Eventually she moved slowly to the door, not sure what exactly her plan was if there  _was_  someone in there, but willing to wing it. She’d been in her share of shop scuffles over the years and felt relatively confident in her own ability to defend herself. All of that was dependent on whether a potential adversary was wielding a real weapon, of course. But when she peaked inside, there was no one there. This was the only door to the place, and the one hanging light was swinging back and forth. Maybe she hadn’t seen a shadow pass after all. Maybe it was just a trick from the swinging light.  _Maybe_. A recording device was sitting on the counter, and after some deliberation and fiddling with the volume settings, Ripley hit the play button. This voice was female. 

“Julia Jones. Today’s update: After numerous demands, Marshal Waits finally called a public meeting to address the rumors that have been circulating on Sevastopol. But instead of the answers we wanted, he continued to be evasive and after only a few minutes, he and his team were pelted by projectiles from an angry crowd. A gun was fired, there was panic, and now Waits and what’s left of his team are forcibly ejecting us from the Terminal. Feels like we’re on our own now.” 

Again, Marshal Waits. He was their contact here.  _How comforting._ He sounded like a real winning personality. She’d been looking around the room as she listened, moving restlessly around the square counter. An access terminal glowed up at her and she wondered if it might have more information about what exactly had gone to shit in this place and when it had happened. A personal message from someone called Harper to someone named Zoe talked about pulling the plug on Sevastopol and the failing businesses on the station even before it was condemned to decommissioning. All spaceflight employees had received a message directly from the office of Marshal Waits and they were told that there would be no flights off the station pending an investigation.  _What was being investigated?_ And finally, a brief document describing APOLLO, the central AI for all working joes on Sevastopol, and also the driving force and overseer of all communications on the station. 

Ripley felt almost less informed now than when she’d first gotten here. There were too many fractured pieces to put together. All she had any idea of was that Marshal Waits was an asshole and something big had gone down.  _So_ _this is a dead end after all._  She rounded the corner again and realized there was a vent in the floor behind the counter. This one wasn’t like the wall vent she’d crawled through earlier. That one was circular and had only a constricting and retracting metal “door” of sorts. This vent was rectangular with two glowing green lights on top, indicating that it had enough power to open and close at someone’s touch. Floor vents had to be designed differently to prevent people from just falling into them. They couldn’t be opening and closing all the time when people moved around them. 

Sighing but at the same time recognizing how limited her choices were, Ripley touched the vent and stared down into the darkness below her. She could see that the floor of the vent was hardly a few feet below and that it must be dimly lit down there, but she hated being in such small spaces. It would be so much harder to defend herself if someone else had the bright idea of using the vents to get around and they ran into each other.  _Tough shit_.  _Not like I have a lot of options._ She lowered herself into the darkness as quietly as she could and closed the door above her. It  _was_  dark down here, with the only light filtering through a wall fan up ahead. She crawled towards the fan until an avenue opened up to her left and she turned the corner. Another corner was up ahead with some kind of light fixture beyond that shone on the metal. She couldn’t see it, but froze when something obviously bumped a light. She could tell it was swinging, just like the one in Xing Xang had been. 

The hair on her arms prickled and stood up uncomfortably and Ripley clenched and unclenched her fists, silently waiting.  _Thought I saw a shadow . . . One door . . . Where else would they have gone? Stupid. Stupid!_ But she heard no noise of knees on the metal floor of the vent or sneakers squeaking occasionally the way hers did when she moved through these things, no matter how quiet she was trying to be. She approached the corner slowly and squinted some as she peaked around it, but there was no one there. The light swayed gently, having lost some of its momentum from the initial impact. The station hadn’t shaken, she knew that much.  _Something_  had bumped the bulb. 


	4. Unlikely Allies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there! Not dead or given up on this yet, I promise. I went on a month long holiday to visit my family during Christmas/New Year and then was massively out of the swing of things by the time I came home. I have pages and pages of notes, enough to get several more chapters out in the coming days, so I'll do my best to keep up on writing and updating more often. Thanks for sticking with me through the quiet phases! The good news is we've finally hit the part of the storyline where other people are actually actively involved, and things won't be so monotonous from here on out. Promise. Thanks again for reading and as always, comments/suggestions/corrections are always appreciated!

There were people here, she’d seen them. She hadn’t seen many, granted, but there had to be more. The real question was why no one was out and about and why the ones she had seen were always running and hiding and getting out of sight before she could ask what the hell was going on. Obviously some kind of shitfest had gone down here and the station itself was coming apart to some degree as a result. She'd seen no evidence of any explosions yet, but some of the damage she passed suggested that  _something_  had exploded  _somewhere_  and caused all of these mounds of rubble, fallen pillars and missing ceiling pieces. She’d taken an extra moment to catch her breath in the vent after the whole swinging light bulb situation before she forced herself to keep going. Upon exiting the vent she’d found herself in a long room with conveyor walkways in the center. Just your typical spaceflight terminal except this one was so full of ceiling vents that now rested on each other, multiple large vacuum machines, an upturned luggage trolley, and plenty of rubble from god knew where else. 

“This whole damn place is falling apart.” She stood there, staring at the wreckage ahead of her. She didn’t feel defeated, not yet, but she was either going to have to hoist herself up over some of the larger structural pieces or find a way to crawl through. She loathed the crawling idea just on the principle that the whole load of crap could come down and crush her at any moment. But climbing posed just as many dangers, so she picked her way forward towards the bulk of the mess and began looking for the easiest way across. Lights sparked occasionally overhead and she clenched her jaw, reminding herself that if the ceiling did come down on her right now, she wouldn’t have too much time to feel anything before she was dead. Probably. There was one vacuum machine that remained upright, and she used the control panel at its rear to move it when she discovered the open vent beyond. This was a ceiling vent that had fallen from above and was lying with one end on the floor and the other up in the air. She crawled through and found her way down the other side and then through a broken piece of railing that had once marked the side of a conveyor line. 

The station shook and she sucked in her breath, too aware of the silence when everything settled and stopped moving a moment later. She needed to get control of this automatic gasp reflex when she was surprised. There were other people here and so far they seemed relatively unfriendly. She crawled beneath a massive round portion of the ceiling that had come out of its frame but not fallen entirely to the floor, waiting the entire time for the thing to fall those last few feet and crush her into the floor. It didn’t.  _Stairs to the baggage claim_. She was actually surprised by the lack of escalators here. Such technologies had been around since before spaceflight was anything like what it had become in her time. Granted, stairs were healthier, but usually such large terminals had such amenities, especially when they had pedestrian conveyors. 

She’d barely taken her first step up the stairs when someone rushed across the top of them from one side to the other. She fell back a step automatically as the light above the stairs burst, glancing to the closest corner of wall and briefly considering whether she should huddle behind it. But the person was gone and everything was quiet again by the time she looked back to where they had just been. That damn gasp reflex was going to get her in trouble one of these times when she needed to be quiet. She took a deep breath and climbed the stairs, pausing at the top to glance over the long list of flights and terminals, all stamped with block letters that read, “CANCELLED.” 

“Someone knew,” was scrawled across the board in spray paint.  _Knew what?_  She wasn’t wondering this for the first time. 

Barriers blocked the walkway on her right, so she went left around the board. “Keep moving,” she murmured to herself even as she read the words on the wall. 

There were a few things that she noticed as soon as she came around the corner and her eyes adjusted to the different lighting, but the longer she looked, the thicker the dread pooled in her stomach.  _That’s a body bag on a gurney. A body_ _b_ _ag_ _. With a_ body  _in it. Or something that looks a hell of a lot like a body._ The gurney itself was halfway across the room from her, but that was hardly comforting. More bodies in more bags, lots more, lined the floors neatly behind the gurney. Emergency floodlights were standing here and there, sharply lighting the center of the room and the door at the far end but throwing the corners of the space into dark shadows. Nothing helpful waited for her behind the help desk on her right, so she moved forward, hugging the wall to her left. It opened into a small alcove with two baggage conveyors. She snatched up a discarded lantern from the floor but gingerly set it back where she’d found it; broken and useless. The door to unclaimed baggage was locked. There was no exit from this alcove. Trying and failing to stifle the shudder that ran through her when she turned to regard the open part of the room strewn with body bags, she kept looking. 

There had to be at least 20 of them spread out on the floor, most of them lined up in neat rows. “LOOTERS WILL PAY,” greeted her on the opposite wall of the darkened baggage claim, and the sight of a functional door made her move in that direction. Beyond this door were the behind the scenes parts of the baggage conveyors behind wire barrier walls on either side. The gate on the left one was closed, but not the one to her right.  Her engineering eye caught the familiar glimmer of another wall generator there.  _Three pumps, push the button_. It gurgled to life and the room around her seemed to get vaguely brighter as a few extra lights kicked on. The gate across the way opened, but nothing immediately useful presented itself there. There were ramps here up into another hallway, and she moved up one of them cautiously.  _Some shit went down here_. That had been obvious before, but the bodies . . . she swallowed the lump in her throat and refocused on her surroundings. 

A locked door waited at the end of the hall, and it had others to keep it company. All locked. A window to an office was somewhat covered by some blinds, but the closer she got the more fucked the scene presented itself to be. The blinds were screwed up and beyond them waited an uncovered corpse on the floor, leaning against his bed cubicle. The glass in the window was broken, she realized. Someone must have launched themselves through it  _and_ the blinds for them to look like this. There was one door here with a brace on it, the kind she couldn’t get through without tools.  _Damn it. Another dead end_. She made her way back towards the large baggage claim room and its assortment of the dead. 

That bizarre and uncomfortable feeling in her gut was back, stronger than ever before. This was beginning to feel almost as if she was being herded, directed on a specific path. So many locked doors that still had power to them, so many that had low power or none at all or were just completely blocked. Obviously it was an absurd thought. No one would go to such great lengths as blowing holes in the floor and dropping support beams from the ceiling just to force someone to wind their way through the hectic maze that she’d found herself in so far.  _But._ That nagging little voice in her head was whispering to her, reminding her of everything she’d seen so far.  _But there’s only ever been one way to go since I got here. Never a place where I have to choose left or right. Never a fork in the road._

She re-entered the baggage claim and started in surprise when the screen of an overhead monitor burst. For the first time she noticed the lines of them that were set high in the ceiling. She passed a small table with a tape recorder on it and pressed play before moving on, unwilling to wait around in the middle of the room as she listened. The voice carried throughout the silent room like its speaker was standing there with her. “Harris? This is Turner. I found the last power coupling. Took me a while, but it’s shut off now. Just fitting the last security brace. Come find me when you’ve shut yours down. Then we can get the hell out of here. Jesus, man .  . . I’m hearing noises everywhere. Every creak and . . . Just hurry the fuck up, will you?” 

Well. That explained the main power being shut off and the braced doors. She was now at the opposite end of the baggage claim than where she’d entered, and the door here was braced, just as Turner had said. There were stairs off to the side here, and they looked like the only option she had left to take.  _Only ever one way to go._ She told that little whispery naysayer in her head to kindly go fuck itself and moved up the stairs, noting more tasteful graffiti as she went. “Fuck the marshals,” was the most prominent among the wall art here. A small lounge was situated at the top of the stairs, and then a functional door led into an office. The place had clearly been ransacked. Papers and folders littered the floor and the desks, drawers were pulled out, lockers left open. The office had an entire wall of glass that looked out over the baggage claim, and she peered through it nervously, suddenly sure that someone was watching her from below. 

Straight through the back of the office there was a security office with a wall full of monitors. Another recording device waited on the desk there for her. She glanced around one more time, skin crawling at every sound she thought she heard, and hesitantly pressed play. 

“Harris? It’s Turner. I had to deal with that wasted asshole again. This time he nearly wrecked the door with a maintenance jack. Guess he figures it’s safe here, wants to lock himself in. Screw him. We’ve got too much to worry about without babysitting drunks. Anyway, I threw him in the evidence lock-up. Let the son of a bitch sleep it off.” 

 _Maintenance Jack_. Maybe the drunk guy was still in the evidence lock-up. Maybe he still had the jack. Ripley thought of the braced doors she’d passed so far and how they’d suddenly be so much less of a problem. Whoever Turner was, he sounded notably shaken. The way he talked about hearing sounds and people thinking they were safe . . . There was so much here that didn’t make sense. She walked back into the main office and found a different door than the one she’d entered through. This one opened to yet another hallway. Crates met her to the left, and an abandoned wheelchair sat by itself across the hall. Directly across from where she stood there was a window, and she could see that the room beyond was a bloody mess.  _Right._ Against her better judgment but still seeking some kind of exit or good news, she went into the bloody room. 

A table had been overturned in one corner, and there was something her gut wanted to identify as blood spattered across it. Water or some other liquid dripped from the ceiling, intensifying the chill in her spine and the distinct feeling that she shouldn’t be here. There were words on the table, but the way it had been tossed left them upside down. “Waits lied to us” she deciphered after an extra second of staring. There was nothing useful here except more cryptic bullshit revolving around the mysterious  _Marshall Waits_ , so she went back into the hall. There was another door but it was braced. Lovely. At least the door at the end of the hall moved when she neared it. A deserted coffee trolley was the only thing in this hall, pushed up against a wall at a haphazard angle and left there. 

_Storage. Finally. The evidence lock-up should be directly attached and –_

“Oh. Fuck.” 

Her words were hardly more than a whisper, but she still regretted the noise she’d made as soon as she’d said them. The aforementioned  _drunk asshole_  was in the evidence lock-up, all right. On the floor, very dead, and lying in a pool of his own blood. Ripley was momentarily so stricken by the amount of blood that she almost didn’t notice the maintenance jack in his hand. The door to the lock-up was braced from the other side and wouldn’t budge, but she  _needed_  that tool in order to keep moving.  _Find help. Great. The people in this place might need more help than I do._  If her experience on this station had taught her anything so far, it was to look for alternate routes. And lo and beyond, a vent waited for her in the wall next to the door. Whether or not it actually led where she wanted to go, she wasn’t sure. But it must lead  _somewhere_  and anywhere was better than here, standing a few feet from a dead man. 

She climbed through the vent and up the ladder loomed up out of the dimly lit space ahead. Thank the maintenance folks here for vent lighting, even if the wires were sparking as she passed. She turned a corner and slowed considerably, noting the dark, wet  _something_  coating the vent floor ahead of her. It looked as if something had been dragged along here, smearing as it went.  _An oil_ _slick_ _?_  Her mechanically-oriented brain tried to suggest quietly. Seeing as there was a bloody dead man in the room below, it seemed unlikely. Her shoes squelched when she stepped on the stained metal, and the smell hit her as soon as she disturbed the dried surface of the stuff.  _Blood. Definitely blood_. How the fuck it had gotten from the man below to the vent up here – or if it was even all  _from_  the same person – she didn’t have the mental energy to really think about. 

The drop from the vent into the evidence lock-up wasn’t terrible, but she still felt the jolt in her shins when her feet hit the floor. She didn’t exactly make a habit of dropping out of ceilings. At least there was empty floorspace beneath the vent and she didn’t have to drop down onto the corpse.  _What a silver lining_. Another recording device was here, not far from the dead man. She briefly searched the rest of the room for anything useful while she listened. If this was the dead man’s voice – which it must be – then he had been  _very_  drunk before he died. Some of his words were slurred or had an obviously inebriated lilt about them. 

“Hello? I want to make a complaint. To the . . . highest authority, okay? My name is Zachary Watson. That’s Watson, you get that? My complaint is this: The fucking marshals. They should be protecting us, it’s their job! Something’s on the station and no one knows what it is, no one fucking knows! They put braces on the doors – lockdown. You know, like to keep something out! I’m fucking terrified, man. I’m fucking . . . Shit, it’s so cold. I don’t even think this fucking thing even works.” 

Ripley bent and pulled the maintenance jack from the Watson’s hand, wincing when she had to give an extra tug because rigor mortis had set in. It was like he didn’t want to let go. That was illogical and she knew it, but the more audio tapes she listened to and bodies she found, the more uneasy she became.  _Something on this station, nobody knows what it is._  “I think I need this more than you do,” she offered quietly when the jack was finally free. She stared down at it for a second, feeling slightly less powerless than before. At least she could use this to remove the hardware on braced doors . . . starting with this one. There was a padlock on the brace, and she broke it with the butt of the maintenance jack, flipping open the cap on the side of the brace. A quick turn to the left and it was hers for the dismantling. She set the brace aside and slipped the jack through one of the loops on the maintenance belt of her jumpsuit. 

Something crashed in the distance as she stepped back into the hallway. It sounded close enough to have been only a few rooms away. She removed the brace on the second door in the hall, and found nothing but what appeared to be an interrogation room there. The recording device on the table confirmed this and she listened briefly before moving on. 

“Interview subject: Heyst. Did I say that right? Heyst? Look, if you can’t even tell me your name we’re going to be here a hell of a long time. I just want to know about your boss. He’s got you into a lot of trouble. Someone’s got to be accountable. I’m gonna make damn sure someone’s accountable. No? Tough guy, eh? Turner, turn off the tape. Maybe our friend here is just shy.” 

And that was that. There was nothing else here to keep her busy so she passed through the office and went back down the stairs. It sounded like something was moving through a vent nearby and the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood up, but she kept moving. She considered the brace on the exit door from the baggage claim, but moved back across to where she’d seen the first corpse earlier, past the wall generator. The previously braced doors yielded only another flare and nothing else of use, so she went back to the main door.  _Three flares and a maintenance jack._ It wasn’t much, but it was more than she’d had to start with. She moved to break the lock on the brace and froze when cold metal pressed against the back of her head. 

“Stay. Still.” It was a man’s voice, and a heavily accented one at that. 

 _A gun. Lovely. A psycho with a gun._ Surely  _he_  hadn’t killed all these people. Right? “Okay. Okay.” Her voice was placating, her mind whirling around what she could possibly do to alleviate the situation. He hadn’t shot her yet, though. So either he didn’t actually  _want_  to or he had other, more sinister plans. 

“Turn around.” The barrel pulled slowly away from the back of her head and she hesitated, wanting to be slow and reasonable about this. “Come on!” he shouted, and she winced and turned in an agonizing half circle, waiting for the gunshot. Waiting for an explosion or the station to shake and make him fire on her. Waiting for  _something_ to go wrong. It always did in this place. She kept her arms out in front of her, and he ripped the maintenance jack out of her right hand. The guy was sweating bullets, she noticed, and looking over his shoulder every few seconds like hell itself was about to come down on them. 

“I’m Ripley,” she offered, keeping her voice low and as non-threatening as possible. 

“Where’d you come from, Ripley?” He sneered her name when he said it. 

It didn’t even occur to her to lie. “Off-station. A ship.” 

This seemed to be the wrong answer. He tensed and shoved the gun at her face, stepping nearer. “There’s no ships here!” His voice was near hysterical.  

She kept her hands up and maintained eye contact, desperate to get him to calm down and believe her. Her face hadn’t changed, and her tumbling thoughts had all settled in a smooth, panicked state of silence. “There are now.”

The man shifted on his feet, stepping back and forth and side to side. “Well,” he said, breathing out in a humorless laugh, “That’s good news, because things are not so good here. Something blew just now, rocked this whole place.” He wasn’t even staying within the same few feet of space anymore, sidestepping his way across the ground in front of her until she had to turn her head to follow him with her eyes. It was like he just couldn’t be still. He returned to stand directly in front of her but several paces back.

“I saw it.” 

Now he craned his neck, glancing up at the ceiling and over his shoulders. The gun wasn’t even pointed at her half the time anymore. The way he waved it around was making her somehow more nervous than when he’d trained it on her initially. “But lady, that’s the least of our problems.” The words seemed to bring him back out of his antsy, distracted state. He refocused his eyes and the gun on her. 

“Yeah?” she asked, looking between the gun and the man holding it. 

His voice dropped. “Yeah. Something’s on this station. Something you wouldn’t believe.”

 _What?_ Ripley was trying to keep her face as smooth as possible, but caught herself frowning. “Like what?” 

The fierce, hysterical edge returned to his expression and his voice. “A killer!” He rushed forward, shoving the gun at her again. “You get it?” 

Now she turned her head slightly to the side to avoid the gun. “Okay.” This man was unhinged, obviously. But everything she’d seen so far didn’t exactly refute his claims of everything gone wrong. She decided to try a new tactic. He’d been doing a lot of the talking, but now seemed like her chance while he was quiet. “Okay,” she said again. “What’s your name?” She slowly lowered her hands and let them hang at her sides.

His movement quieted some, but the gun didn’t waver. “Axel.” 

 _At least it sounds like he’s listening._ “I was boarding with two colleagues, E.V.A. We got separated by the blast. Can you help me find them?” 

He looked past her, confusion all over his face. “Why?” he whispered. 

“Because you seem to know your way around.” 

His whispers became harsh and shrill. “No, I mean why! What’s in it for me?” He all but turned the gun and pointed it at himself as he gestured at his own chest. 

 _Think fast, Ripley_. “A place on the ship.” She straightened and adjusted her weight on her feet, wanting all the confidence she didn’t feel to present itself in her voice anyways. 

“Yeah?” he snarked immediately. “How do I know I can trust you?” But his voice was quieter now, and the gun wasn’t pointed at her anymore.

She leaned forward as she spoke. “I need to find comms. I need to contact my ship.”

He looked away and down at the maintenance jack in his hand, tapping it against his leg absently. Thinking. After several seconds of consideration he held it out to her, and she reached out tentatively.

Axel didn’t let go when she curled her hand around the tool, making pointed eye contact first. “This is your lucky day.” He released the jack and she took it, sliding it into one of the loops on the waist of her workshop bibs. 

He put away the weapon and she breathed a sigh of relief as she turned to open the door. That suffocating anxiety of being totally alone in a place that should be brimming with people was gone, only to be replaced by the concern that her newfound ally may turn on her at any moment. 


	5. Monster

“Let’s go, sweetheart. Seegson Comms is in the Systech Spire. It’s quite a distance, but we can get to the transit through the freight area. Watch yourself. We can get into all sorts of trouble here, okay?” 

Axel’s words echoed in her mind as they stepped through the door and moved down the hall that opened up before them. Ripley made to do her usual slow-paced creeping and noting everything she passed, but her new pal wasn’t having it. 

“Come on. I don’t want to stick around here long.” 

She grudgingly picked up the pace. They were still moving relatively quietly and Axel still had the wild, neck-craning-around-constantly look about him, but they were moving much quicker than Ripley had before. “Was that you following me back there?” They passed into a room with fans build into the walls on either side as she asked. 

Axel was all business and still leading the way, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if he’d answer. “Had to keep my distance. Can’t take any chances.” 

Now two doors loomed up on either side, labeled  _Staff Lounge_  to the left and  _Exit to Station_  on the right. Axel kept them going straight and Ripley tried to refocus on the conversation. Both of them seemed ready to jump at shadows. Something caught her eye as they passed the doors and Ripley doubled back to check inside one of them, but found only ruined cords and metal scraps. “Inquisitive type, eh?” Axel’s voice echoed in the empty hall in spite of its low volume, and she sensed that he winced at the echo just as she did. She returned and they kept walking, coming up on an open elevator door to the right. 

“Stick close to me,” Axel ordered in a low voice. 

“Why?” Ripley moved to hug the wall as they continued, but Axel stepped out further into the middle of the space to be more easily seen. 

“Hey! Don’t move!” He abruptly lifted his gun to point it at the elevator. Ripley moved closer to him and found two people standing there, trying to fix the control box inside. They could be a couple or siblings, she wasn’t sure. 

It was the woman, probably around Ripley’s age or younger, who spoke first. “Okay. Okay. We’re not looking for trouble. Who are you?” 

Axel didn’t hesitate or give Ripley time to open her mouth and respond. “I’m John. This is Ringo.” 

Ripley couldn’t help the quiet look of confusion and amusement that she shot at the back of Axel’s head, but she kept silent.  _John and Ringo? Really?_

The man in the elevator waved his hand at them in spite of Axel’s weapon and went back to fiddling with the elevator panel. “They’re just some assholes. We haven’t got time for this. Come on, Jana.” 

This seemed to conclude the conversation, or at least Axel and the guy in the elevator were satisfied with it. Ripley wasn’t. “We’re trying to get to comms. Can you help us?” 

Axel turned to her, disbelief and annoyance clearly etched in his face. “We don’t need their help.” 

The woman – Jana – looked as if she was about to speak, but her partner cut her off. “Don’t tell them anything! Look, I’ve got the elevator working. Jana, let’s go. Okay?” 

Ripley didn’t understand Axel’s apparent allergy to working together, and Jana seemed to feel the same way about the man she was with. “I- I’m really sorry. Good luck.” 

The women shared a brief glance and then the elevator doors closed. 

Axel lowered his gun and put it away, shoving it into his pocket as he had no holster. 

 _That’s safe._  “What the hell was that about? Why are you so damn aggressive?” 

“Everyone’s running shit-scared, keeping to their own. Safer that way.” He walked off, and Ripley made a face at his back before following. They were quiet for a short period, leaving her to notice the graffiti on the walls. 

“No hospital, No authority, No hope”

“Left to rot” 

“KEEP OUT” 

They passed crates and yet another blocked door, and a single airport buggy. As they walked Axel muttered, “Hope this ship of yours is the real McCay.” It seemed to be an absent thought and one that didn’t require a response, so Ripley left well enough alone. They walked down an empty hallway and turned a corner, and an elevator marked a dead end in their path. This seemed to be exactly what Axel was looking for though, because he stepped right up to it. “Hold up. Let me get the elevator,” he said as they approached. “Allow me. Place is old, needs a special touch.” The doors opened and they stepped inside. 

Ripley was nearest the buttons but left them alone, assuming he’d want to be the one to deal with them just as he had the doors. 

“Well, what are you waiting for? Hit the button.” 

She pressed it and stepped aside, letting her arms hang at her sides but lifting her hands in a quiet apology.  _Freight Shipping_ , it was labeled. The button panel dinged at them cheerfully as they began to move. 

The elevator had only just started moving and Ripley hadn’t said shit, but Axel found reason to give more orders. “Keep the noise down, you hear? There might be people around.” Perhaps it was a warning regarding the area they were heading towards and not an admonition for previous activities, but she was still annoyed. While the elevator was carrying them around and making its own noise he couldn’t complain if she talked, so now was the perfect time to bombard him with all the remaining questions she had that were still unanswered. 

“I’d appreciate it if you told me what the hell was going on.” 

Axel seemed unfazed by her serious tone. “Listen, darling. When we get to the ship we can kick back, braid each other’s hair, and chat all you want.”

She wasn’t hearing it.  _There’s too much going on here. I need to know._ “Yeah, when we get to  _my_ ship,” she reminded him. “I need to know what’s going on. Right fucking now.” She punctuated the last three words clearly and waited for them to sink in. Axel was clearly not a person to be trifled with, especially as he was the one in this situation with a weapon. But Ripley was entirely unimpressed with him at the moment and needed some god damn answers. 

Axel lowered his voice as if they might be overheard, shrugging as if to brush off her brusque tone. “Fine. Like I said, there’s a killer.” He got louder as he went on. 

“A killer,” Ripley repeated, frustrated. “What does that even mean?” 

Axel didn’t break eye contact or look away, and she disliked how serious he was as he answered. “I ain’t seen it, but it’s here. Picking us off one by one.” 

 _It?_ “What are you saying? A psycho? A person?” 

“No. Something else. A monster.” He said the last word with some emotion she didn’t have time to unpack, but whatever it was, it was genuine.  _Fear? A monster . . ._  

The elevator chuffed at them and began to slow, signaling that their conversation was coming to an abrupt and untimely end. As soon as the doors opened Axel was out of them, clearly done with being interrogated. She followed. There were lots of large crates here and there in this hallway. They’d make running through here a bitch.  _No need for running right now_ , she reminded herself, trying to soothe the janky nerves in her spine that itched to run or hide or do  _something_  besides walk around in plain sight. Was it Axel’s mention of the monster that had really set her off? She couldn’t be sure. That same heavy, oily dread from before settled in her stomach and she tried to pass it off as the result of not eating more than a small amount of cereal since hypersleep.  _What a great fucking day to have skipped breakfast._

Axel pulled his gun, bringing her back to the present. Muffled speaking floated down the hall from up ahead and Ripley moved nearer to the wall on her right, relieved that at least this time Axel was doing the same. “Shit,” he whispered urgently. “We need to move. This way! Get down!” 

They’d only just hunkered down behind a large crate against the wall when two men walked by ahead of them, both carrying firearms. Semi-automatic weapons, by the looks of them. Something much more powerful than Axel’s little pistol, to say the least. This hall dead ended into another one in a T shape, and the two men entered from behind one corner and walked across. 

They hadn’t seen the two intruders, at least. Their conversation remained casual and they continued to walk by slowly and unhurried. “This is bullshit, man. We should be looking for a way off!” 

“Are you crazy? There’s no way off. At least we’re safe down here.” 

“For how long? What if they come for us?” 

“Then we shoot the crap out of them. Now shut up; you’re making me nervous.” 

They continued past the corner to the right and their speaking became more muffled and inaudible. 

The last thing Ripley could make out chilled her. “I keep thinking I can hear it through the walls.” They were too far away for her to tell whether it was the nervous man or his level-headed partner, but either way, the sentiment was eerie. 

She looked to Axel for direction once they’d passed, sure he’d have something to say. “Trouble,” he confirmed. “We’ll have to go around them. Follow me.” There was a vent in the wall right next to them, Ripley noted. And sure enough, Axel moved closer to it. He smashed the button in the frame and the metal opened. 

She followed him in and kept her voice low, but couldn’t help saying something smart. “Friends of yours?” 

He kept moving, crouching and making his way awkwardly through the tight space ahead of her. “I’ve had run-ins with those guys before. They don’t like strangers, even nice guys like me.” 

“I’m shocked.” 

“I ain’t pulling your chain, darling. You want to go and say hello, it’s your funeral. Those guns aren’t for show.” 

She believed him. “Someone should be doing something,” she said after a few seconds of silence. The words weren’t directed at Axel in any way, but he still had an answer for her. 

“They are. It’s called surviving.”  She was still considering retorts when he continued, “Everyone’s turning on each other. The fear, it makes people crazy.” 

“I’ve noticed.” 

After a number of turns and corners, Axel stepped out of the vent into a small room ahead of her and she followed, pausing as soon as she was on her feet and properly upright again. “You’ve been . . . living here?”

“What can I say?” He said, tearing her attention away from their messy surroundings and back to his face. “My butler’s on holiday. Grab what you need. You don’t know when you’ll get another chance.” 

They moved into the next room, which was slightly larger and much dimmer. Boxes were stacked here and there and a bare mattress sat on the floor beside her. Several Thrust magazines were spread around, more than one open to display scantily clad women in front of galaxy backgrounds or wearing a space helmet and almost nothing else.  _That’s more than I ever needed to know about you, Axel. Ugh_. A radio was next to the bed and tuned into some oldies station, volume turned nearly all the way down.

“Been hunkered down here for a week now, waiting for a ship. Waiting for you, I guess.” 

She glanced at him and then returned to her perusing, looking for anything of use. A fan was pointed at the mattress and there were a couple of pieces of reading material here besides the magazines. The Android Brain: Understanding Our Half Brothers by Albert Magnus, and the Users Manual for micro computer system MRT-80.  _Ah. That I know back to front from trade school._ Maybe Axel was smarter than his anxiety-driven behavior had let on. 

“It can get pretty dark around here. You should take that flashlight over there. Make sure you’re stocked up on batteries.” 

Surprised, Ripley looked up from her studies in what she could assume about Axel based on his media choices and followed his gaze to a small flashlight headset on some boxes across the room. She was somewhat surprised he was willing to help her enough to share supplies, but then again she was his ticket out of here. She took it and put it on, testing the buttons to get used to them. 

“Just be careful not to flash it around. You don’t want to get caught.” She found an extra battery pack as he turned to climb into yet another vent. “Let’s go. This way.”

One last glance around the room, and she was sure she’d missed nothing important. The lights in the vent flickered on and off, but not so badly that she needed to use her new tool. It was a very short vent compared to some of the more extensive ones she’d crawled through so far, and they were climbing out into another open space – this one much darker – before she knew it. All of the lights were blown out here besides one directly above them, and baggage conveyors loomed in the darkness beyond. 

“I’ll watch the vent. There’s another vent ‘round here somewhere. I marked it so I wouldn’t forget it.” 

Ripley hesitated as she looked around, glad she had a flashlight but not exactly thrilled with being voluntold to explore the dark. 

“How about you look around?” Axel prodded. “We’re not going anywhere until you find that vent.” 

Ripley switched on her flashlight and got to looking. They were in two medium sized, interconnected rooms with open spaces between them instead of real doors. Luggage and boxes were heaped into piles and falling off the still conveyor. She moved forward with more confidence because of her light source but shrunk back when something crashed overhead not so far away.  _Ceiling vents? Oh joy._

The doors she came upon were all locked or had no power, and several of the things she initially thought to be vents turned out to be fans mounted back in the wall. Another pack of batteries caught her eye, falling out of some unlucky person’s suitcase. Surely they wouldn’t mind if she made some use of them, right? The noise from above had been loud and real, but done and over with quickly enough that she pushed it out of her mind and could almost believe she hadn’t actually heard it just a moment later. But then there were other noises, like something moving nearby. Not in the room, definitely in some sort of vent, but certainly not far enough away to be harmless. The urge to flick off her flashlight and melt into a corner was difficult to resist. 

“This place gives me the willies.” Axel’s voice floated through the stale air in the room and took on a strange tone as it echoed, giving Ripley more uncomfortable goosebumps than the vent noises had. Someone had been here, and they’d been drinking. Energy drinks or beer, she couldn’t be sure, but they’d had a lot of it and left their cans all over the floor. A box labeled fragile sat at the end of one conveyor with bent in corners and several dents throughout the sides.  _Handled with care,_ she thought sarcastically. The noises from above came again. Something moving, something heavy, something that was far too close for comfort.  _A monster_ , Axel had said. She chewed her bottom lip and kept looking, breathing out a sigh of relief when she found a vent in the wall. Not that this was going to lead anywhere more promising or safe, necessarily. Hell, this vent might connect to the one that  _whatever or whoever_  was traipsing around in up there. 

“Axel,” she whispered shrilly, trying to be quiet while also making her voice carry enough to catch his attention. “Is this it?” 

“Hold on, I’m coming.” He must not have heard the most recent bumps and thumps of the ceiling boogeyman, because he spoke far too loudly for Ripley’s liking. She turned off her flashlight as soon as he arrived, willing to use only as much battery as she had to. His light was enough for the both of them when they were this close together. “I knew it was here somewhere,” he said as soon as he saw the vent. “See? Got it covered.” 

 _Glad I could be of assistance_. She kept her gripes to herself and silently watched him kneel and fiddle with the vent. “Come on,” he murmured impatiently, mashing the button more than once. The vent door sparked and then parted, and he climbed in without another thought. 

Ripley made to follow him but paused at the sound of something light being dragged through the vent directly overhead. The sound faded and she crawled through the dark hole in the wall, eager to be closer to Axel if only for the comfort of not being alone. These noises were almost enough to make a girl start believing in monsters.  _Almost._

“It’s not smart to stay here too long,” he was saying as she caught up to him. The vent seemed to agree, groaning as the lights inside of it sparked.

She was still stuck on the disturbing noises. “This the way everyone travels around here?” she asked, hoping to dispel some of her own nonsense fears of monsters in the vents. Could have just been another person, right? A fat one, by the sounds of it? 

“Just those that want to stay alive, sweetheart.” 

She brushed off the pet name, reminding herself that it wasn’t worth the argument. There were few things she hated more than men – and women – who called people  _sweetheart_ and  _honey_ and  _darling_. Then again, she hated a lot of things, so the list was long. Her mom could get away with it, of course, but she was her  _mom_. When parents said things like that it was always different than when some random guy who didn’t know her took it upon themselves to grant her gross nicknames. The thought of her mom reminded her of the entire reason she was here.  _For answers_. They’d been making their way slowly along as she thought, but Axel interrupted her moment of new re-motivating herself to deal with the station’s bullshit. 

“Torrens. So that’s your ship, huh?” He turned around another corner, and Ripley resisted the urge to scramble to keep up, hating that she was left in the dark when he moved like that. There were lots of corners in this damn vent, and her nerves were close enough to freaked just from everything she’d seen so far and the noises earlier. She opened her mouth, not exactly sure how to respond besides with a simple confirmation, but Axel slowed his pace and lifted a hand without looking back at her. “Quiet. I hear something.” 

They crept up to a slatted air vent in the wall, with just enough room between the metal to see through if you were right next to it and there was light on the other side. Axel switched off his flashlight before they got too close and they listened. Two more armed men were on the other side of the vent, standing in the hall. Garbled words came through the one man’s headset. “Yeah, I hear you. Will do.” He turned to his partner. “Got to meet the others. Something's going down.” 

The second man seemed unimpressed. “There’s always something going down.” 

“Come on. We don’t want to piss him off.” 

“I guess we better, but it’s your idea, not mine.” This seemed to conclude their exchange, and they walked off to the right. Ripley noted with concern that this was the same direction the vent led them, which meant sooner or later their paths would cross. 

“Follow me.” Axel kept his flashlight off, depending on the dim light filtering through the slotted metal on their left. He moved away, and Ripley crawled after him. They paused near the vent opening and waited for the two men to pass, and then both of them warily climbed out. Axel was all business. “Okay, we’ve got to be quiet here – Don’t shine that flashlight.” 

Back the way the men had come from their left were various luggage trolleys and a nonfunctional elevator. She jerked her head around to look right again when Axel moved that way, hiding behind a corner of wall and peaking around at the door. “Quietly!” he ordered. 

 _No. I was going to yell or offer them my flashlight batteries._ The redundancy of his reminders was tempered by the necessity to remember that he was right. They moved through the door and crouched behind some crates, suddenly much more exposed if they left their new hiding place. This was a cargo hangar, far larger and more open than most of the rooms Ripley had made her way through so far. And this one had a small group of people in the center. 

“Hold up!” Axel whispered, as if she hadn’t noticed the danger. 

The two men they’d seen earlier had obviously just rejoined the group. “What’s the emergency?” The man’s voice was at moderate volume, but seemed booming in the expansive space. 

“Someone has been here. Everyone, stay alert. Keep your guns tight. Shoot anyone you don’t know.” This man sounded like he was some kind of  _in charge_. 

“Got it.” 

“Stick around while I check our stock.” The louder man left briefly.

“This is some bullshit.” Nervous from earlier was clearly unsure. 

Axel bumped her arm to catch her attention. “They’re armed. Too many of them to take on.” 

 _Um._ “Take on?” 

He motioned across the room, past the group of people. “We’ve still got to get through the door at the end.” 

There were lots of crates here but they were in clumps and there were emergency floodlights set up often enough to keep things in the center of the room generally well lit. Creeping all the way past them might have been doable with one person, but there were two of them. Not to mention the weapons and the order to shoot strangers on site. “How?” she asked, more than just a tad uncomfortable with the situation. 

Axel seemed mostly unfazed. “Let’s try a distraction. The generator. If that went down, they’d have to check it out.” He hardly took two breaths before adding, “You’re smaller than me. You’ll make less noise.” 

She stared at him, incredulous. “Great.” 

There were four people in the center of the room, and all three of the men had guns.  _Great._ The bossy man returned. “Which one of you checked our supplies last?” 

It was the nervous guy’s time to be on the spot. “I did. What’s up?” 

“You decide to help yourself a little?” 

All semblance of nervousness turned to anger at the accusation. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

The first man with the headset stepped in. “Hey. He’s been with me the whole time.” 

But the leader wasn’t convinced. “We’re missing food, ammo, meds. If it’s not one of us, then we were right. Someone’s been in here.” 

The only woman in the group spoke up. “This is no good. We’re supposed to be secure down here!” 

“Damn it. What about the lock Joe rigged up?” 

“I’ve just come from there. It’s sealed tight. Eyes open. Keep your guns ready.” 

The woman spoke again. “Someone’s gonna have to tell the boss.” 

Headset man scoffed. “Boss? He’s a goddamn store clerk.” 

The man who had checked supplies stepped forward aggressively. “Yeah? Maybe you think you could do better?” 

“He’s not saying that.” 

Headset took a softer tone. “I’m just saying-” 

“Just stop saying and help me check the rest of this stuff. That is, if you can keep your trap from running for five seconds.” 

Time was clearly running out before someone decided this particular stack of supplies was worth checking on, so Ripley crouched and made her way across the room to the right. She skirted around the group, stopping between cover long enough to check everyone’s locations whenever she could. The last jaunt to generator room was too open for comfort, but she crept along it as quickly as she could and without looking back. _No sense seeing a bullet in the instant before it puts a hole in your skull._  

“Look, we’ll make it through this. I promise.” Now Headset was trying to rally the troops and be motivational. No one answered him. “Hey, we can do this,” he tried again. 

Nervous decided to pitch in, but his words were much less cheerful. “Station feels like a graveyard, huh? I’m glad I found you guys.” 

This was a large generator, and one she could have probably turned off with enough time even without a proper terminal console and commands. But there was a terminal here, which saved her a fair headache. She considered her escape options before initiating the shutdown. There was only one door to this room, and leaving the way she came wasn’t an option once everyone’s attention was on the generator. A convenient floor vent glowed green next to her, and wondered if the group would be too concerned to notice it.  _To hell with it. I’m about to find out._ She initiated the shutdown in the terminal and dove into the vent immediately, crawling a few paces away from the opening. The second it took for the door to close after her had her heart pounding in her chest. 

“The fuck just happened?” 

“Generator died.” 

“It just turned itself off? No, somebody’s here.” 

“Check on it. Everyone with me.” 

She couldn’t make out exactly who was who anymore, though the female voice was obviously different than the rest. Their shuffling feet echoed through the floor and into her vent as they approached the generator room all at once. God, she hoped this wasn’t some dead end vent that she’d have to double back on and crawl out of. Axel may as well leave her here if that was the case. 

“This is so wrong.” 

“Who’s there? Come out and we won’t hurt you.” 

“Doesn’t seem to be broken.” 

“How could you know, Einstein?”

“If the generator had blown, there’d be smoke.” 

“Well, it’s not working now.” 

“Maybe the safety got tripped. Could have been a rodent, got stuck in it and set off the safety.”

“A rat? Big fucking rat to do that.” 

“Well, I don’t know.”

The voices became more muffled as Ripley moved down the vent and away from them, but they filtered through the slotted opening she’d taken and followed her enough that she still heard what was being said. She moved slowly, terrified they’d hear her shoe squeak and come barreling in after her, guns blazing. 

“Someone is fucking with us. Probably the same person who stole our stuff.”

“That’s a scary thought.”

“That’s why we’ve got guns. Come on, help me find the switch to get it started again.” 

Ripley saw another floor vent up ahead, and prayed that wherever it came out was close enough to the exit she and Axel sought that she wouldn’t be caught. The last words to follow her through the vent were the lone woman’s. “Do you think the thing’s here?” 

She pressed on the door and it slid aside, and she took a deep breath before climbing out. No bullets or shouts met her, and she was at least closer to her destination than when she’d started. She darted through the door as quietly as she could, and Axel sprinted across the room after her. “Nice work, Ripley. This way.” 

She fell into step behind him, hardly content with the casual speed walk he’d settled on. After what she’d heard, she’d be running right now if she was alone. 

“Keep it down. They’re still close by,” he reminded her. “Follow me.” 

The path reached a dead end ahead, but a single door waited to their left. “How much further?” she asked, glancing nervously behind them. 

Axel, on the other hand, did no looking back. “Nearly there. Transit’s just up ahead.” They turned a corner. “Let’s just hope your ship’s still there.” 

She followed in silence with no comforting words of agreement. 24 hours, Verlaine had said. The notion that she and her colleagues wouldn’t be back within 24 hours had been laughable when they first boarded Sevastopol. Now it seemed like a potential time crunch. 

“Sevastopol not quite what you were expecting, eh?” 

They entered another generator room, this one with four medium sized generators in two separate rooms that were connected by a single winding hallway. There was a window between the rooms so that engineers on one side could see and communicate with those on the other, but it was empty now. The hallway between was wet and cold, with dripping coolant pipes. 

“I’m not even supposed to be here. My shipping out papers were for a week ago.” The words sounded like they were supposed to be somewhat humorous, but Axel’s voice was tinged with anxiety. 

Ripley paused to use the terminal in the corner, only finding two messages there. Something to S from Bailey about skimming stuff,  _lovely._ And something else to Neerson and Leonard from Joe about a two man rule when dealing with the generators. Then there was the inventory of the people they’d snuck past earlier. “4x aspirin, 32x canned food, 6x cereal boxes, 4x gallons of water, 12x toothpaste tubes, 3x cigarette cartons, 26x toilet paper rolls, 6x industrial tape rolls, 2x med kits, 52x powdered milk. Low on ammunition, found prescription drugs.” 

 _That’s nowhere near enough water for that many people_ , she thought as she followed Axel into the second generator room. But the door they were supposed to exit through was closed and had no power.

“It’s powered down! The assholes have cut us off.” There was an eye level monitor on each side of the window between rooms, and Axel was looking at this one closely. Ripley recalled the two man rule, but he was already ahead of her. “Got it. We need to activate both consoles at the same time to open it. I’ll do this one. You go to the one on the other side.”

“Okay.” Ripley felt strangely exposed and uncomfortable moving back  _towards_  the armed individuals they’d just gotten away from, but she moved quickly to stand in the other room in front of the monitor. She could see Axel through the window panel, and lifted her hand to press the button on the monitor. 

“Ready? On three. One, two, three!”

They pushed their buttons at the same time and the door behind Axel opened. Ripley’s relief immediately turned to dread when the opening door revealed a waiting man. “Axel, behind you!”

“What?” 

The man walked up and hit him from behind, and it turned into a scuffle. He spoke into his radio, calling for backup. “Fuck you! Get here now. I’ve got the thieving son of a bitch.” 

Ripley turned and ran through the hallway to get to them.

“You bums think you can take what you want?” the man demanded. 

“Get the fuck off me,” Axel yelled back. 

She sprinted up to the two of them, pulling out the maintenance jack and smashing it haphazardly into the man’s back between his shoulder blades. He released Axel and fell to his knees from the blow, and Axel whirled around and shot him in the face. 

Ripley fell back a step, stunned. “Fuck.”  _What the fuck?_  

Axel was clearly not as unperturbed as he’d like her to think, but he was ready to keep moving. “Let’s go. There are others on their way.” When she hesitated, staring at the dead man, he waved his hands in her face. “We need to go, now!”

“Hey, you bastards!” The man’s backup had arrived at the door Axel and Ripley had entered through, and these people were armed. 

“Move it,” Axel said, rushing through the now-open door with Ripley on his heels. 

“Shoot them!” The voices of their pursuers sounded less aggressive an instant later as they’d clearly paused at the body. “Shit, I think he’s dead! They killed him!”

She followed Axel down a hall and into some kind of mechanical storage room. Chains hung from the ceiling, the kind that were used to secure large machinery and cargo during a ship’s flight. This room was drippy as well, though definitely not due to condensation on coolant pipes.

“Come on!” he shouted, but stopped abruptly when there seemed to be nowhere else to go.

“You killed that guy!” Ripley said, unable to focus properly on anything else until they’d talked through what the fuck had just happened. 

Axel stood a few steps away from her, shaking his head emphatically. “Because he was going to kill me! You saved my life!” He got too close for comfort and grabbed her by the shoulders, giving her a shake. “This is about survival!” He took her face in both hands to force her to look at him. “Do you understand?” 

The shock of what she’d seen was still processing, but his forceful response was enough to help her come out of it as much as could be expected in the moment. The chains above them jingled rhythmically, but the station hadn’t shaken. Ripley hardly noticed, but Axel released her immediately and backed off, whirling to look at the rest of the room. She put her face in her hands and scrubbed her fingers through her hair, trying to calm herself. 

Axel’s attention was no longer on her. “Do you hear something?” he was backing away from her slowly, craning his neck to see up into the darkness of the high-ceilinged room above them. He shushed her. “I hear something.” 

She brought her hands down and stared at him, biting her lips to keep from speaking, and trying to steady her breath. The chains continued to jingle and chime against each other, and she finally started paying attention to them. “Axel,” she started, staring at his arm. A glob of something had just dripped from above them, something gooey and whitish. It was like saliva almost, only so much thicker and slimy looking. 

He looked down at his arm, frowning as he touched the stuff. “Fuck. Fuck have I got on me?” 

He lowered his hand and looked up towards the chains, and for the first time since meeting him Ripley saw real fear in his eyes. Suddenly he jerked and arched forward, and something pointed and black burst through his chest. He screamed, and Ripley’s mouth fell open in a surprised shriek. She didn’t even have time to back up before the thing wrenched back out of him. She fell back hard onto her hands and scuttled backwards until she hit a crate, staring as it yanked him bodily into an open vent high in the wall behind it. 

“No!” The thing moved too fast and was too dark for her to get a proper look at it during its entire five second appearance, but she’d seen everything she needed to. She shoved herself back to her feet, leaning against the stacked crates behind her for support. Her entire body shook with the shock and she felt close to passing out as the adrenaline hadn’t yet set in. Blood dripped from the vent and pooled on the floor below, and the chains swung and clanged together cheerfully as they lost their momentum from being disturbed. She knew she should run or hide or do s _omething,_  but for several seconds she just stood there, leaning dangerously to the side and breathing hard. 


End file.
